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ADMIEAL BLAKE 



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ADMIKAL BLAKE 



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\IBLI0GBAPIfJ^4^r.:^0TE. 

The authorities^^;^ t^e lif e of Bl^k^ar.&;;;^canty and of 
dubious value. Iij§^4st„o£ J3t)tjtrae^l^ mentioned in 

the Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), 1649-57, but the 
references to him are in a great majority of cases purely 
official and of little interest. Other mention of him is to 
be found in Rushworth, Thurloe, and the compilers and 
memoir- writers of the time. In Thurloe are some of his 
despatches, and of the orders sent him when on foreign 
service in his later years. 

An account of the first battle of the Dutch war was 
published by authority under the title of ' The Answer of 
the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England to three 
Papers delivered in to the Council of State by the Lords 
Ambassadors Extraordinary of the States-General of the 
United Provinces.' It gives the English version of the 
preliminaries of the encounter, and may be compared with 
the Dutch story as told in the life of Cornelius Van Tromp, 
Martin's son and successor. 

There are also official or semi-official ' Narratives ' of 
the capture of the Plate Ships, and of the attack on Santa 
Cruz, published by authority. 

No life of the Admiral was written till nearly half 
a century after his death. In 1704 one appeared in a 
collection of ' Lives English and Foreign.' It was an at- 
tempt to supply a want with indifferent means. When the 



VI 



Bibliographical Note. 



reaction against Walpole's policy had brought on the war of 
Jenkin's Ear, and there was a revival of interest in the old 
naval glories of the country, two lives, by very different 
hands, were written to meet the popular demand. Dr. 
Johnson turned the life of the collection into good English. 
His short biography has, of course, an independent literary 
value, but it does not pretend to be an original authority. 

About the same time there appeared ' A History and 
Life ' professing to be the work of a gentleman bred in the 
family. It was manifestly written in Grub Street while 
Yernon's capture of Portobello was a fresh and glorious feat, 
but if the author did not use up some local tradition he was 
a clever fellow with a dash of Defoe in him. 

Mr. Hepworth Dixon's ' Life,' published in 1852, is a 
work of undoubted research, and had at least the advan- 
tage of being written before his style had reached its full 
maturity. 

A long and careful article on Blake will be found in 
' The Dictionary "^of National Biography,' vol. v. 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. TO THE CIVIL WAE ... . . . . 1 

11. THREE SIEGES ... .... 11 

III. THE :n-aty of THE com3j:o:n^wealth . . . .35 

IV. THE PUESEIT OF EFPEET 48 

V. 11^ THE CHAlJiNEL, AND AT WHITEHALL ... 64 

VI. WAE WITH HOLLAND 75 

VII. THE DUEL WITH TEOMP 9d 

VTII. IN THE MEDITEEEANEAN 114 

IX. CHASING THE PLATE SHIPS 133 

X. THE CAPTIJEE OF THE PLATE SHIPS . . . . 151 

XI. SANTA CETJZ DE TENEEIFE 165 

XII. CONCLUSION 179 

INDEX 191 



EOBEET BLAKE. 



CHAPTER I. 

TO THE CIVIL WAR. 

When Nelson was about to sail on the one unsuccessful 
enterprise of his life — the attack on Santa Cruz de Tene- 
rife — he wrote these words to Earl St. Vincent : ' I do 
not reckon myself equal to Blake : but, if I recollect 
right, he was more obliged to the wind coming off the 
land than to any exertions of his own/ ' The greatesu 
sailor since our world began' was not wholly just in 
his implied criticism on the seventeenth-century Ad- 
miral. Blake did not sail into the harbour of Santa 
Cruz blindly relying on the chapter of accidents to 
give him a means of retreat, but this sentence is none 
the less peculiarly fit to stand at the head of his bio- 
graphy. If Robert Blake had no other claim to be 
remembered, it would still be enough to entitle him to 
a high place among our heroes, that he planned and 
successfully carried out an enterprise which, a hundred 
and fifty years later, in the midst of a war of continual 
victories, still seemed over-bold to Horatio Nelson. 

B 



2 Robert Blake 

Robert Blake, like the great soldier and statesman 
who became his sovereign, ' was by birth a gentleman ; 
living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in 
obscurity.' The Blakes were indeed a family of less 
wealth and less distinguished connections than the 
Orom wells, but they belonged to the same class. They 
were country gentry in Somersetshire, owning land 
and engaged in trade. The anonymous author of the 
' History and Life ' of the Admiral probably tells the 
strict truth when he says that the ' Blakes of Plansfield, 
in Spaxton parish, were of good antiquity, but of no 
higher account as to descent than that of the principal 
yeomanry.' The name was a form of Black, and is so 
spelt by the author of the ' Life of Cornelius van Tromp.' 
Early in Elizabeth's reign the Blakes were settled in 
Bridgewater, and were prosperous traders of sufficient 
standing to fill the most important municipal offices of 
the town, and sufficient wealth to leave legacies to the 
poor. A tradition no better founded than such things 
usually are, tells how the first information of the sailing 
of the Invincible Armada was brought by a Bridgewater 
ship, the property of Humphrey Blake j the Admiral's 
father. Whether he did the State this service or not, it 
is certain that he was a prosperous man who left behind 
him a considerable fortune and a very large family. 
The fortune is put at 8,000L, a much larger sum in the 
early seventeenth century than it would be in these 
days. Even at the end of the last century, Boswell 
wrote of the Thrales' one hundred and thirty- five thou- 
sand pounds as he would have written of a million, or 
even two, in this year of grace 1886. In 1625, the date 
of Humphrey Blake's death, 8,000?. was a third of the 



To THE Civil War 3 

income of the richest noble in England, the Earl of 
Worcester, and common report is exceptionally menda- 
cious if a hundred thousand would bear the same 
proportion to the equivalent revenue now. The money- 
was invested in an estate at Knoll Hill, near Bridgewater, 
which continued in the Admiral's possession till his 
death, and passed to his brother. The names of thir- 
teen sons, of whom six grew to manhood, and of two 
daughters, have been preserved, and there is some 
reason for believing that even this long list is not 
exhaustive. Robert Blake was the eldest of the family. 
His baptism is entered in the parish register under the 
date of September 27, 1599, and his parents must 
have been lax in the discharge of their religious duties 
if they deferred the ceremony for more than a week 
after his birth. He was, therefore, some five months 
younger than Oliver Cromwell. As he owes his fame 
to the discharge of duties forced on him by the civil 
war, but not sought by any ambition of his own, the 
records of his early life are necessarily scanty. He 
was a middle-aged man before he gave up the quiet life 
of a country gentleman. So little is known about him 
that it is possible in his case to apply the system of 
modern historians in the most developed form, and in- 
corporate all the authorities in the text verbatim. They 
are in fact only two — Anthony Wood and Clarendon. 
The first, giving a list of B.As in his ' Fasti,' under the 
date of February 10, 1617, says: 'Robert Blake of 
Wadham College. This right valiant person having 
taken no higher degree in this University, I must there- 
fore make mention of him in this place. Born therefore 
he was at Bridgewater in Somersetshire, being the son 

B 2 



4 Robert Blake 

and heir of Humplirey Blake of tliat place, gent., but 
descended of an antient family, of tlie Blakes of Blanch- 
field in the said county. In the beginning of Lent 
Term in 1615, he being then about fifteen years of age, 
was matriculated in the University as a member of St. 
Albans Hall, about which time, standing for a scholar- 
ship of C. C. OoU. with Eob. Hegge and Bob. Newlin, 
was put aside, whether for want of merit or friends I 
cannot tell. While he continued in the said Hall he 
was observed by his contemporaries to be an early riser 
a.nd studious, but withal he did take his pleasure 
fishing, fowling, and sometimes in stealing of swans. 
Before the time came when he was to take a degree in 
arts he translated himself to his countrymen in Wadham 
Coll., and as a member of that house he did stand for a 
fellowship of Merton Coll. with Alex. Fisher, John 
Douglas, Edw. Keynolds, John Earl, &c. an. 1619, but 
whether it was for want of scholarship, or that his person 
was not handsome or proper (being but of stature little) 
which Sir Henry Savile, then Warden of that Coll., 
did much respect, he lost it, continued in W^adham 
Coll. without the taking of any other degree, and in 
1623 wrote a copy of verses on the death of the learned 
Camden. Afterwards he went into his own country, 
where he lived in the condition of a gentleman, but 
always observed to be puritanically inclined.' 

So far Anthony Wood, saying very m.uch what 
Clarendon says in his more stately way as far as the 
mere facts go. ' He was a man of a private extraction, 
yet had enough left him by his father to give him a 
good education, which his own inclination disposed him 
to receive in the University of Oxford, where he took 



To THE Civil War 5 

tlie degree of a Master of Arts [it was a B.A.], and was 
enough versed in books for a man wlio intended not to 
be of any profession, having sufficient of liis own to 
maintain liim in the plenty he affected, and having then 
no appearance of ambition to be a greater man than he 
was. He was of a melancholy and sullen nature, and 
spent his time most with good fellows, who liked his 
moroseness and the freedom he used in inveighing 
against the licence of the times and the power of the 
Court. They that knew him inwardly discovered that 
he had an anti-monarchical spirit, when few men 
thought the government in any danger.' This account 
is doubtless substantially accurate, and may be accepted 
with the proviso that Clarendon wrote after the civil 
war, and does not profess to have known Blake per- 
sonally. He would naturally interpret the Admiral's 
early opinions by the light of his later actions. 

If the amount of evidence is not considerable, it has 
the merit of affording a reasonably good text for specu- 
lation. And the biographers have not been wanting to 
themselves. They have asked how Blake came to lose 
the fellowships, and what would have happened to 
England if he had won either. Even Dr. Johnson has 
left a sententious reflection on Sir Henry Savile's curious 
whim as a thing not to be expected from an editor of 
Chrysostom. In the course of conversation, if the 
subject had ever come up, the Doctor would probably 
have pointed out that Wood's passing reference to the 
Warden's liking for tall fellows was not necessarily 
much more than a proof of the Oxford man's fondness 
for a mild jest at the expense of the Head of a College. 
Neither was it necessary for Mr. Hepworth Dixon to 



6 Robert Blake 

bring in Blake's puritan principles to account for his 
failure. Biographers have, in fact, jumped to the 
conclusion that because the student from Somersetshire 
beat Tromp in the fifties he was qualified to hold a 
fellowship thirty years earlier. For the rest, if he had 
gained one, it would not have prevented him from 
girding on the sword in 1642. Colonel Michael Jones 
made a very efiicient commander of the Parliament's 
army in Ireland, lawyer as he was, and a fellowship, 
even if he had held it so long, would not have prevented 
Blake from defending Taunton. As regards his learn- 
ing we may safely accept Clarendon's statement that the 
future Admiral worked at Oxford as much and as little 
as thousands of others who have gone through the 
University because it was part of their education as 
gentlemen, but with no intention of qualifying for a 
learned profession. He could quote Latin to the end 
of his life. The verses on Camden's death were not by 
him, but by William Blake, perhaps a younger brother, 
and it is possible that Wood's mistake as to their author- 
ship led him into exaggerating the length of Robert's 
stay at the University. 

Upon the death of his father in 1625, Blake entered 
into possession of the family estate of Knoll Hill, and 
with it he would naturally undertake the duty of 
educating and establishing in life his very numerous 
brothers and sisters. This obligation, which was the 
burden attached to his privileges as eldest son, probably 
accounts for the fact that he lived unmarried ; ' though 
some would insinuate,' says a biographer, '• that, as far 
as his religion would allow, he had a monkish turn, and 
others, that he was a woman-hater.' His election as 



To THE Civil War 7 

member for Bridgewater in 1640 is to a certain extent 
a proof of tlie trutli of Clarendon's statement that Blake 
was known for tlie freedom of his comments on the 
King's administration. Two Puritan divines, Devenish 
and Norman, are said to have been mainly instrumental 
in securing his return. Indeed, the Admiral's whole 
life is there to prove that he was one of the majority of 
thinking Englishmen, Clarendon himself and Falkland 
among them, who heartily disliked Charles's method of 
government. England was not oppressed by a grinding 
tyranny between 1625 and 1640, nor was it the country 
to have endured oppression. The habit of talking of 
the King as if he had been a Duke of Alva, popular a 
few years ago, may now be given up ; but if Charles was 
not a tyrant he was guilty of the folly of continually 
advancing claims which would have led to tyranny if 
applied by a stronger man. His habit of appealing to 
a higher law which gave him the right to override the 
law as known to Englishmen was in itself enough to 
irritate his subjects. They feared for the future if they 
were not seriously oppressed in the present. And this 
government which asked the country to trust its wisdom 
so blindly was weak at home and imbecile in its foreign 
policy. Above all, Englishmen suspected, and, as we 
now know, with justice, that the Court, if not the King, 
was prepared to go to dangerous lengths in intriguing 
with the Pope and the Catholic Powers. They saw the 
King's fondness for all that seemed to tend to Eome, 
and his hearty dislike to whatever was most hostile to it. 
The long struggle with Spain and the Catholic reaction 
had made it the first article of most Englishmen's 
creed, that the Pope and all he represented were the 



8 Robert Blake 

visible agents of the Enemy. It is permissible to liave 
no doubt of Blake's opinion on tlie subject. He almost 
certainly looked at tke Komanising tendencies of tbe 
Court and the misgovernment of the King as parts of 
the same whole, which it was the duty of Englishmen 
to amend at the first fair opportunity. With these 
opinions he would naturally be a welcome candidate for 
the country party, when the failure of the first Bishops' 
war ^ compelled Charles to have recourse to his Parlia- 
ment after an interval of eleven years. 

Blake was not re-elected after the hasty dissolution 
of the Short Parliament. His place was taken in the 
Long Parliament by a Wyndham. The fact that the 
Wyndhams were steady Eoyalists throughout the war 
is not in itself a proof that there had been any change 
of opinion in Bridgewater between the beginning and 
the end of 1640. In the November of that year the 
country had been angered and frightened into una- 
nimity. It was determined to be done with the kind 
of government it had endured for more than a genera- 
tion under James and Charles. Men who were to fight 
for the King, and men who w^ere to fight for King and 
Parliament, were of one mind when the Houses met at 
Westminster. While this vehement feeling lasted, it 
mattered little who was chosen by a constituency as 
its representative, as long as he was not a mere courtier, 
and Bridgewater would naturally send a member of a 
great neighbouring house to Parliament. The influence 
of the Wyndhams was strong in that part of Somerset, 

* It is, I trust, not impertinent to remind the reader that the 
'first Bishops' war,' so called, was the King's futile attempt to 
support Episcopacy in Scotland in 1639. 



To THE Civil War 9 

and would be vigorously used at such a crisis as a 
matter of course. 

Fifteen months later a great change had come over 
the country. The attack on the King's methods of 
government had inevitably developed into an attack on 
the hereditary power of the crown. With this change 
had come division ; on one side, a profound distrust of 
the character of the King, and an equally deejD hatred 
of the ecclesiastical policy of Laud, had taken form in a 
series of measures, which, whatever else we may think 
of them, were assuredly calculated to produce a very 
sweeping change in the character of the English Mon- 
archy and Church. Men who thought first of all of the 
liberties of England and the puritan side of religion 
were prepared to support these measures. On the 
other hand, those to whom the ancient Monarchy and 
the Church of their youth were dear recoiled when they 
began to see whither the Parliament was tending. In 
the early summer of 1642 England was at the parting 
of the ways, and though she knew it not, was on the 
verge of the great civil war. 

Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on D'Aubigne, has noted the 
old Huguenot's delight in the hearty zeal of the French- 
men's fighting in the religious struggle of the sixteenth 
century. It was little, in D'Aubigne's opinion, that 
torrents of blood were spilt, but much that Frenchmen 
could freely throw away their lives for a cause. We 
may be pardoned, or even think no pardon is needed, 
for looking in some such spirit on our own great struggle 
of the seventeenth century. There was hypocrisy and 
spite and acrid priggery on the side of the Parliament. 
There was unpatriotic intrigue and dissolute ruffianism 



10 Robert Blake 

on tlie side of the King, but it is not by these things 
that either side is to be judged. The meaner men of 
the parties could never have emerged from obscurity 
except by the involuntary help of nobler fighters. It 
may be said of the country as justly as of its King, that 
it nothing common did nor mean upon that memorable 
scene. Cavalier and Eoundhead both fought like men, 
and it is good for a country when its sons can so fight 
for principles. 

Blake took the side of the Parliament, and having 
once drawn the sword, he threw away the scabbard. In 
the absence of any details of his words and actions we 
are reduced to argue from the conduct of the class to 
which he belonged, in order to form an idea of his 
course. As a small country gentleman of puritanical 
leanings and grim anti-papal patriotism his natural 
place was with the Parliament. He took it, and in 
the spirit at least he kept it till he died on board the 
^ George,' entering Plymouth Sound, worn out by the 
greatest series of victories save one ever gained by any 
English admiral. 



II 



CHAPTER II. 

THREE SIEGES. 

The crisis of the civil war was passed before the name of 
Blake began to be of any considerable mark among the 
Parliamentary officers. His great feat, the defence of 
Taunton, was performed during a year beginning six 
days after the battle of Marston Moor and ending in 
the July of the following year ; when the New Model 
advanced into the West, after ruining the King's army 
in the Midlands at Naseby. During these critical 
months he alone upheld the cause of the Parliament in 
the important belt of country which extends from the 
Severn to the Channel, and he did his cause vital service 
by hindering the Western army from marching to the 
help of the King. Up to July 1644, he had been known 
only as an able and trustworthy officer in Popham's 
regiment of militia. As might be expected, his early 
services have shone with a certain amount of glory 
reflected from his later victories. Family tradition, and 
even contemporary Royalist opinion, have credited him 
with having raised a troop, variously said to have been 
horse, foot, or dragoons, for the forces of the Parliament. 
This statement seems to have been dictated rather by 
the opinion of the writers as to what, considering his 



12 Robert Blake 

subsequent eminence, lie ought to have done, than 
founded on any knowledge of what he actually did. 
Wherever his name appears, it is as a member of 
Popham's regiment. Whatever recruiting he did was 
doubtless for his own corps, and in that service he 
would naturally not be remiss. Indeed, when the war 
began, there was no occasion to raise particular corps 
for the Parliament's service in Somersetshire. The 
organised force of the county, formed of the militia 
regiments of Sir John Horner and Colonel Alexander 
Popham, was loyal to the Houses. They had so marked 
a superiority over the unorganised Royalists, that when 
the Marquis of Hertford attempted to serve the King's 
summonses of array at Wells in the summer of 1642, 
he was driven into Hampshire without even being able 
to strike a blow. It is characteristic of the absence of 
any conscious tendency to a social revolution on the 
Parliamentary side, that Popham's regiment was raised 
by precisely the means used to form forces for the King. 
Alexander Popham himself was a country gentleman 
of large estate, and he recruited his men from among 
the tenants on his manor of Houndstreet, near Bridge- 
water. Blake took his place, according to the social 
ideas of the time, as lieutenant or captain under his 
wealthy neighbour. At a later period we shall find the 
name of one of the Pophams associated with Blake's 
among the chiefs of the fleet. 

A detailed account of the first campaigns in the 
West would be out of place here, but some leading facts 
must be mentioned for the purpose of showing, as far as 
possible, what was Blake's share in these, the most pic- 
turesque and chivalrous episodes of the civil war. After 



Three Sieges 



13 



his failure at Wells in August of 1642, tlie Marquis of 
Hertford retired to Slierborne in Dorset. Here he 
remained till Goring surrendered Portsmouth to the 
Parliament, and then finding his position untenable, 
marched across Dorset and Somersetshire, to Minhead 
on the Bristol Channel. That he should have been al- 
lowed to march right past the force which had lately 
driven him from Wells is a proof of the military inex- 
perience of both sides in the early times of the war, and 
also of the prevailing belief that the quarrel would be 
settled by the first battle between the King and the main 
Parliamentary army. The Somersetshire men were pro- 
bably under the impression that it was nowise incum- 
bent on them to fight unless they were directly attacked. 
If so, they soon had good cause to wish they had been 
more stirring. The marquis himself took ship at 
Minhead, and passed over to South Wales, but he 
despatched a small body of horse to Cornwall, under the 
command of Sir Kalph Hopton, the best officer in the 
King's service. This handful of cavalry, and its brave 
and skilful leader, were soon reinforced by the Cornish 
Koyalists under Sir Bevil Greenvil, Sir Nicholas 
Slanning, and Sir John Trevannion, and from the two 
was formed the famous Cornish army which by the end 
of the summer of 1643 had conquered all the West, 
except the ports, for the King, and had joined hands 
with his forces from the midland counties. What share 
Blake had in the various scandalous Parliamentary 
defeats under their incompetent generals, the Earl of 
Stamford, and Euthven, at Bodmin, Tavistock, Stratton, 
and elsewhere it is impossible to say. As part of the 
garrison of Bristol, to which his regiment belonged was 



14 Robert Blake 

detached under the Earl in the "West, it may, however, 
be the case that he learned his business in the wholesome 
school of defeat. 

While the Oornishmen were organising and pre- 
paring for their advance, the Somersetshire Royalists 
had not been wholly idle. The Stawells, Wyndhams, 
and other Royalist gentry, whose estates for the most 
part lay to the west of the Parret, began to stir for their 
cause. As early as the summer of 1642 blood had been 
drawn by Sir John Stawell's arraymen at Marshall's 
Elms, and although the King's partisans were not yet 
strong enough to make head against the Parliamenta- 
rians, they kept up a struggle for influence for a time. 
It is in some part of this confused conflict that we must 
place an event in Blake's life which is singularly cha- 
racteristic of the Puritan and the Englishman. His 
regiment was in possession of Bridgewater, engaged in 
trying to bring the surrounding country over from its 
allegiance to the Wyndhams. Among the captains of the 
regiment was Samuel Blake, his younger brother. One 
day ' Captain Samuel Blake was diverting himself at a 
little inn, then and now the Shoulder of Mutton, at 
Pawlet, four miles from Bridgewater ' (' Hist, and Life/ 
p. 67), when he heard that a Royalist officer was at 
Combwich, in the neighbourhood, engaged in levying 
men for the King. The array captain was attended by 
an armed party, and Samuel Blake was alone, which 
of itself was sufficient reason for keeping quiet. The 
Malignant, moreover, was on his way to the Royalist 
side of the Parret, which was a further motive why 
Captain Samuel Blake should ^ take his bate and go 
home ' peacefully. With a rashness, however, which 



Three Sieges 15 

may be, without excessive want of charity, partly ac- 
counted for by the excellence of the ' bate ' at the 
Shoulder of Mutton, the Parliamentary officer started 
in pursuit of the intruders, and caught them up at 
Streachill. Here he persisted in attacking them, and 
was inevitably — but one hopes not without reluctance 
on the part of arraymen — cut down. The bad news 
was soon brought to Bridgewater, and reported to the 
officers of Popham's regiment. None of them were in- 
clined to carry it to Blake, who was known to have 
a particular affection for his rash brother. "While they 
were discussing in whispers and debating who should 
tell, in the constrained way natural to the circum- 
stances, Blake joined them, and soon saw that some- 
thing was amiss. The absence of his brother would of 
itself be a painful warning. He was not the man to 
hang back for hearing the worst, and his direct ques- 
tion soon extorted the evil news, with all the circum- 
stances. When the story was ended, he made the 
laconic and superficially heartless comment, '• Sam had 
no business there,' and went stoically about his duty. 
When the work was done he returned to his quarters, 
and then the natural man let his grief have its way. 
When his door was shut his servant heard him break 
into weeping, exclaiming, ^Died Abner as the fool 
dieth.' He would be a strange Englishman who did 
not sympathise with lago's reluctance to carry his heart 
upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. 

By the summer of 1643 the Royalists were masters 
in the West. The Cornish army and Rupert's men had 
joined hands in Somersetshire, and had utterly routed 
the unlucky Sir William Waller at Roundaway Down. 



1 6 Robert Blake 

In July the combined Eoyalist armies sat down before 
Bristol. The town was insecurely held by Colonel 
Nathaniel Fiennes for the Parliament with a weakish 
garrison. There was a strong Eoyalist party in Bristol, 
and a plot to hand it over to the King had only recently 
been crushed by stern military executions. Neither 
was the town strong in itself. It lies in the low ground 
round the juncture of the Avon and the Frome. On 
the south or Somersetshire side it was not commanded, 
but on the north or Gloucestershire side its defences 
were composed of forts on Prior's, St. Michael's, and 
Beacon Hill, which skirt the Frome. Blake was in 
command of Prior's Hill. These forts were connected 
by a low wall hastily constructed, and not appreciably 
strengthened by a shallow and for the most part dry 
ditch. As long as this line was held Bristol was safe, 
but when it was pierced at any point the town ceased 
to be defensible, for it lay ' in a hole,' as a Eoyalist 
officer who served in the siege justly points out. Once 
inside the line, the assailants could, of course, clear it 
by charging the defenders in flank. This is precisely 
what happened. The intaking of Bristol — to use Dal- 
getty's expressive though, unhappily, obsolete word — 
was an excellent example of the sieges of the civil war. 
In these remarkable military operations — until Crom- 
well appeared on the scene — the general method seems 
to have been to send ' fire-balls ' and other missiles 
over the wall at the roofs of the houses, until you 
thought you had thoroughly frightened the enemy, and 
then to fall on with pike and sword, keeping your 
cavalry ready for a charge up the streets as soon as 
the gates had been opened by the infantry. Against 



Three Sieges 17 

a weak garrison or a sympatlietic town, this procedure 
had its merits and succeeded very well. Where these 
conditions were wanting, as at Gloucester or Taunton, 
it commonly resulted in the loss of hundreds of men 
uselessly shot down at the edge of a ditch. The 
Royalists made their attacks from both sides : the Cor- 
nish, army on the south, and Rupert's force, from Durd- 
ham Down, on the north. They prepared for the 
storm by a series of inefficient cannonades, night 
attacks, and other ' military masquerades/ which made 
' beautiful pieces of danger ' in the dark. In the course 
of these preparatory operations, Prior's Hill fort was 
^ shrewdly torn,' but it does not appear to have been 
effectually breached. At last, on the night of July 
25-26, after various feints and postponements, the 
Royalist chiefs made their final and successful storm. 
The time had been fixed for the early morning of the 
26th, but the Cornish men were so eao^er to begrin that 
they anticipated the hour, and rushed furiously at the 
southern fortifications in the dark. They were decisively 
repulsed, with the loss of their gallant leaders, Slanniug 
and Trevannion. As soon as Rupert's men on Durd- 
ham Down saw the flash of the Cornish army's fire, 
they, too, mustered for the attack, burning not to be 
outdone. One consequence of all this undisciplined 
ardour was that the northern force had to attack without 
their storming ladders, which were not yet ready, and, 
except at one point, they fared as might have been ex- 
pected. Lord Grandison commanded the force which 
attempted Prior's Hill fort, and advanced with all the 
attention to art possible in his unprovided state. Cap- 
tain Blake was found on the alert, with his matches 

C 



1 8 Robert Blake 

burning. Attacks to right and left of the fort, headed 
by lieutenants of Lord Rivers' regiment, with fifty men 
apiece but no ladders, were summarily beaten off. 
Colonel Fawcett attached a petard to a gate, but it ex- 
ploded outwards only. Then the repulsed men were 
drawn together, reinforced from the reserve, and having 
failed at the weaker points, were sent ladderless, as 
before, to try the desperate task of storming the fort. 
They failed to shake the nerves of Captain Robert Blake 
and his musketeers, and were again beaten off with loss. 
Hopeless as the game was, the Royalists were not pre- 
pared to give it up. Their officers had many weak- 
nesses, but want of courage was never one of them, and 
Sir Ralph Dutton brought his men on again, to be 
again uselessly sacrificed. A last attempt was now 
made by Lord Grandison himself. Sword in hand, he 
led his soldiers into the very ditch. By this time Blake 
had become so conscious of his strength that he no 
longer waited to be attacked, but sallied out and met 
the enemy at the foot of the wall. A purely profes- 
sional soldier would have profited by his assailant's folly 
to win an easier victory, and have shot him down at 
leisure from over the parapet, but in the civil war there 
was a certain love of fighting for its own sake, and a 
spirit of fair play, which made men do these rash things. 
The Parliamentarians yielded to the carnal vanity of a 
desire to show the Malignants that the saints were not 
afraid to meet them on equal terms, and so received them 
at push of pike in the ditch. Here, just as day was break- 
ing, the last fight was fought. It was short, and for the 
Royalists terribly costly. Lord Grandison soon fell, mor- 
tally wounded. Colonel Owen, who took his place, was 



Three Sieges 19 

disabled a few minutes later by a gunshot wound, and 
tlien, at last, the Koyalists broke and fled down tlie bill. 
Meanwhile, the attacks on Brandon and St. Michael's 
Hills had ended no better for the assailants, but a 
line of defences is no stronger than its weakest part, 
and the Royalists had found the fatal spot. In the dip 
between Brandon Hill and Prior's Hill the ditch was 
shallow and dry, the wall low, and mostly made of turf. 
A body of Royalist infantry, led by Colonel Washington, 
scrambled over, apparently without meeting serious op- 
position, for the Parliamentarians had not force enough 
to hold all the wall. A breach was soon made in the 
turf barrier by Colonel Washington's pikes, and then 
Rupert's horse swept through and cleared the line b}' a 
vigorous charge. As soon as the Prince had forced his 
way to the suburbs of Bristol, Fiennes surrendered. 
He has been severely judged for the act, and in the 
following year he was condemned to death by a court- 
martial for his alleged cowardice. The sentence was 
undoubtedly harsh, since Bristol was really indefensible 
when once the forts on the heights were turned, and as 
the citizens were not prepared to make a Saguntum of 
their town, there was nothing left to do but to surrender. 
It is sufficient excuse for him to point out that Rupert 
himself had to surrender to the New Model under very 
similar circumstances. Fiennes, unfortunately for him- 
self, drew suspicion on his courage by showing a flurry 
which was doubtless largely due to a consciousness that he 
had damaged his political career by military failure. One 
among his other laches served to attract some attention 
to the name of Blake. Fiennes, in his confusion, forgot 
to send news of his surrender to the officers command- 

c 2 



20 Robert Blake 

ing in the forts. When they were summoned by the 
Royalists, two of them at least — Blake at Prior's Hill, 
and Captain Husbands at Brandon Hill, very properly 
refused to give up their posts till the surrender had 
been notified to them by their own commander. For 
this, it is said that Rupert, with his customary violence, 
theatened to hang them, and Clarendon adorns the 
tale by saying that Blake (he does not mention Hus- 
bands) was forgiven on the plea of ignorance urged by 
interceding friends. As a matter of fact, no such inter- 
cession was needed, the two officers, as Prince Rupert 
would know as soon as he heard the truth, having only 
done their strict duty. 

From Bristol, Blake marched away with his regiment, 
probably more or less plundered by the Royalists who 
violated the capitulation. In the interval from July 1 643 
to April 1644, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant- 
colonel, and at the latter date he appears again as one 
of the officers commanding under Colonel Ceely, the 
governor of Lyme. As Rushworth speaks of him in July 
1644 as ^ a stout commander belonging to the garrison 
of Lyme,' it is probable that he had been quartered there 
immediately after the loss of the port on the Avon. 
The capture of Bristol was the turning-point of the 
Royal fortunes in the West. Up to then their forces 
had won a series of well-deserved victories, but from 
the moment their cause appeared triumphant, a decline 
began which reduced the Western army from its place of 
honour among the King's forces to a mere rabble. The 
loss of Sir Bevil Greenvil, Sir Mcholas Slanning, and 
Sir John Trevannion, the first at Lansdown, the other 
two at Bristol, had removed the high-spirited gentlemen 



Three Sieges 21 

who fought for King and Church. Hopton was called 
on service elsewhere. The folly of the King in dis- 
placing the Marquis of Hertford — the head of a family 
which had once claimed the crown, and therefore perhaps 
suspect in such troubled times — had deprived him of 
the services of one who, if he was not a general or states- 
man, was at least a patriotic English noble. In the room 
of these leaders the King's cause in the West came to be 
represented by Prince Maurice, a pale copy of his brother 
Rupert, and by such unworthy adventurers as Sir John 
Berkeley and that triple traitor, the drunken Goring. 
With such generals the Western army soon became de- 
moralised, and then drifted to ruin. Soon after the cap- 
ture of Bristol, Maurice, accompanied by Lord Carnarvon, 
marched to reduce Dorsetshire to obedience. He was 
even then defied by Poole and Lyme, in which Blake was 
perhaps already stationed, and turned from them, without 
making an attack, to hasten to Exeter, where the Earl 
of Stamford was still holding out for the Parliament. 
Exeter surrendered in September 1643. Then Maurice, 
after quarrelling with Carnarvon, who rode away to die 
for the King elsewhere, made an unsuccessful attack on 
Plymouth, and in the spring of 1644 reappeared in 
Dorsetshire, and sat down before Lyme. It was of 
infinite importance to the King, who was stifling in the 
midland counties, to get access to the sea. As a natural 
consequence, the Parliament was concerned to bafile him. 
Lyme, a place of no military value in itself, was desired 
by the Royalists because it was a Channel port very con- 
veniently situated for running cargoes of arms from 
France or Holland. The Parliament being well aware 
of that fact, had hastened to strengthen these ports 



22 Robert Blake 

after tlie fall of Bristol, and tlie Earl of Warwick, their 
admiral, wlio was cruising in the Channel, had charge 
among his other duties to assist the garrison. In the 
town there were about a thousand men, while the 
besieging army of Prince Maurice is variously put at 
about twice and a half or three times that number. On 
April 21 [o.s.] he sat down before the town, and there 
he remained until June 15 [o.s.]. Up to May 23, when 
the Earl of Warwick's squadron arrived and relieved the 
town, the Prince and the garrison had a variety of brisk 
encounters, marked by the usual diversity of cannonades, 
assaults, repulses, and sallies. According to Colonel 
Weir, who wrote a 'diurnal' of the siege up to the arrival 
of the Earl of Warwick, Prince Maurice's guns, though 
they played very hot, did astonishingly little damage 
except to the thatched roofs of the houses. It is there- 
fore not surprising that his assaults were uniformly 
unsuccessful, since a thousand resolute men, fighting 
behind a barrier or in loopholed houses are a fair match 
for rather less than three times their own number of 
assailants. Colonel Ceely, however, did not confine 
himself to his lines. Before the end of April he had 
been already joined by two Parliamentary war-ships, 
commanded by Captains Seamaster (otherwise Somaster 
or Somersted in the careless spelling of those days), and 
Jones. These officers not only supplied him with 
stores but landed a naval brigade, and on April 30 (o.s.) 
the garrison, helped by our '• bold seamen,' sallied out, 
and according to Colonel Weir, killed so many of the 
enemy ' that the water that supplied the town was 
coloured with blood.' For the next three weeks he con- 
tinues to report ' thundering alarums,' with encounters 



Three Sieges 23 

not a few. When tlie Admiral anchored off the town 
on May 23, he found the houses of Lyme much battered, 
but its defences in good order. The garrison had suf- 
fered little loss of life, but was sadly in want of shoes, 
stockings, clothes, and pay. Their need of food was so 
serious that the sailors of the fleet offered to sacrifice 
a fourth of their rations of bread for the next four months, 
' and to bate it proportionally out of every day's allow- 
ances, yet with hopes that the State would make it good 
again.' The generosity and its prudent qualification 
are alike characteristic of the British seaman. He was 
ready to help, but saw no reason why the official gentle- 
men should not lend a hand too. The contribution of 
the sailors, together with what else the Earl could spare, 
made a substantial relief, and when he stood to sea 
after helping to beat off another assault in which Weir 
and Blake were both wounded, he could trust the town 
to take care of itself. It did so with complete success 
till the approach of Essex compelled Prince Maurice to 
raise the siege and march away to Cornwall, much dis- 
credited, according to Clarendon, by his failure before 
such an insignificant place. 

Although Blake's name is only incidentally men- 
tioned by contemporary authorities on the siege, it 
would seem, from the character of the next service on 
which he was employed, that he had risen steadily in 
the estimation of his superior officers. In July 1644 
he was detached with Sir John Pye to make an attempt 
on Taunton. This town had remained in the hands of 
the Eoyalists since the Cornish army's victorious inva- 
sion of Somersetshire, and was still held for them by 
Colonel Reeves. When Prince Maurice fell back before 



24 Robert Blake 

Essex, he had withdrawn a large part of the garrison, 
but had not removed the stores in the castle. The 
hope of securing this magazine would have been enough 
to tempt a flying column of Roundheads, but they had 
other reasons for attempting the town. Taunton was 
not only the centre of a strongly puritanical district, 
but was of inestimable value as a military post. It 
commanded a fertile territory, and as it lay on the line 
of communication between the West and the midland 
counties, a puritan garrison within its walls would be 
a particularly irritating thorn in the side of the Royalists. 
When Sir John Pye and Blake marched out of Lyme, 
the military situation was very favourable to their enter- 
prise, as Essex had swept the Royalists out of the field 
in Somersetshire for the moment. On July 8 the 
Parliamentary flying column appeared before Taunton, 
and summoned Colonel Reeves. The King's ofiicer 
made no resistance. With a mere handful of men as 
a garrison, and an unfriendly town to hold, he was in 
fact in no position to fight, and he did the best he could 
for his cause by obtaining terms which allowed him 
to carry his soldiers to the nearest Royal post. He was 
compelled to leave his stores, and so the captors found 
' in the castle one demi-culverin and ten other small 
pieces, two tons of match, eight barrels of powder, store 
of arms and ammunition, with much household furniture 
and plenty of provisions.' These last were probably 
the treasures of Malignants, and had been put in the 
castle for safe keeping. There was soon to be need for 
the munitions of war. 

Blake had now reached that crisis in a soldier's life 
which has been fatal to so many promising ofiicers. 



Three Sieges 



25 



After doing good work as a subordinate, he was now 
left in command, and in no easy one either. Sir John 
Pje was called away, and Blake was appointed governor 
of Taunton, with the rank of colonel. Before the end 
of 1644 he had to fight for his post. The King indeed 
made no attempt on the town, either in his march into 
Cornwall in pursuit of Essex, or during his return east- 
ward after receiving the surrender of the Parliamentary 
foot at Foy in September. He had good reason for his 
neglect as long as the Parliamentary general's army 
was unbroken, but he paid dearly for leaving Blake 
unattacked on his return. The loss of Taunton was 
destined to be one of the causes of the ruin of the 
following year. It was Blake's obstinate defence of the 
town ' which indeed disappointed all our hopes,' says 
Clarendon, ' both in men and money in that great 
county, for it kept 4,000 foot and 5,000 horse employed 
nearly all the summer of 1645.' 

The leaguer of Taunton was twice interrupted by 
Royalist defeats, so that in fact Blake had to defend 
his post through three sieges. His first assailant was 
the Colonel Wyndham who succeeded him as member 
for Bridgewater. He having failed to hold his ground in 
front of the town, was replaced by Sir Richard Greenvil, 
who was wounded, and followed by Sir John Berkeley, 
who was driven away in his turn. Goring renewed the 
siege and remained there till Fairfax and Cromwell came 
red-handed from Naseby Field in hot haste to make an 
end of the King's army in the West. The military de- 
tails of the siege are of the kind usual in the civil war. 
Taunton was then a country town of greater relative 
importance than it is to-day, but it was even then a 



26 Robert Blake 

small place, consisting of some three parallel streets 
connected by alleys ; with its church, grammar school, 
and castle; the whole being surrounded by an old- 
fashioned wall. Its real strength lay in its resolute 
garrison, and in the determination of its citizens to 
hold out to the last. Against this post the Royalists 
brought horse, foot, and dragoons, but no proper batter- 
ing train, and apparently no sappers and miners. They 
fired over the wall, and burnt down whole streets of 
houses, but they made no breach, and the loss of life 
they succeeded in inflicting was trifling. Two hundred 
in killed and wounded is reported to have been the 
extent of the garrison's casualties throughout the 
lengthy siege. Blake was not helped only by the 
military inefficiency of the Royalists, but by the feuds 
which divided their commanders and led to the endless 
intrigues and quarrels described over whole pages of 
Clarendon. This disintegration of the besiegers was of 
material assistance to the Parliamentary commandant, 
and has much to do with accounting for his successful 
defence. Had the King's officers been united, and had 
their attacks been properly made, Taunton must soon 
have fallen. It is, however, no diminution of Blake's 
glory that he had not to defend his post against a united 
or efficient enemy. No general can do more than 
avail himself to the utmost ,of his opponents' mistakes 
or weakness. His defence of Taunton was no such 
feat as the defences of Londonderry or Saragossa, but 
if Taunton had been assailed as these towns were, no 
courage or skill could have prolonged the defence for a 
week. 

The first summons to surrender came from Colonel 



Three Sieges 27 

Wyndham, and was answered with, a defiance in stern, 
pious, puritan style. ^ These,' wrote Blake, ' are to let 
you know that, as we neither fear your menaces nor 
accept your Proffer, so we wish you, for the time to 
come, to desist from all overtures of the like nature 
unto us, who are resolved, to the last Drop of our 
Blood, to maintain the Quarrel we have undertaken, 
and doubt not but the same God who hath hitherto 
protected us will, e'er long, bless us with an issue answer- 
able to the justness of our Cause ; however, to him alone 
shall we stand or fall.' Blake was soon able to show 
that the spirit of the garrison was ' answerable ' to the 
firmness of the governor's language. While Goring, 
who should have been covering the siege, was engaged 
in one of the numerous drinking bouts or equally 
numerous intrigues which divided his time between 
them, a Parliamentary ofiicer of the name of Yandruske 
succeeded in slipping past the Poyalist army and 
bringing a force of horse and dragoons into Taun- 
ton. With this reinforcement Blake sallied, attacked 
Wyndham with complete success, and drove him in 
rout back to Bridgewater. The defeat of Wyndham 
seems to have opened the eyes of the Royalists to the 
importance of Taunton. Goring and the council of 
the Prince of Wales suspended their disputes so far as 
to make some preparation for an effectual siege, and in 
early spring Sir Richard Greenvil sat down before the 
town. He was disabled by a wound at an early period, 
and succeeded by Sir John Berkeley, a Royalist of the 
Goring stamp. Sir John began by gaining some measure 
of success. He stormed an isolated post at Wellington 
House, a little distance out of Taunton, and ruined it 



28 Robert Blake 

completely. Tlien lie devoted himself for montlis to 
blockading the town, to firing into it, and' to laying 
stratagems to draw Blake out, such as were used by 
the Good Lord James against the garrison of Castle 
Dangerous. The bombardment failed to shake the 
citizens, and the stratagems were useless against the 
caution of Blake, but the blockade soon began to reduce 
the town to straits. The sufferings of the townsmen 
do not seem to have reached a point which a German 
of the period of the Thirty Years War would have con- 
sidered as far removed from prosperity. The author of 
the ^ Song of Triumph,' composed to be sung on May 
11, in memory of the raising of the siege, has obviously 
collected all that his own experience or tradition had 
to tell him of the sufferings of the time, and yet it is 
doubtful whether a burgher of a Thuringian town or a 
peasant of the Palatinate would have recognised his 
picture as representing the horrors of war at all. Thus 
he sings in barely tolerable verse : 

Our bread was fourteen pence per pound, 

And all things sold full dear, 
Which made our soldiers make short meals 

And pinch themselves full near. 

Our beer was eighteen pence per quart 

(As for a truth was told) 
And butter eighteen pence per pound 

To Christians there was sold. 

Still beer at eighteen pence the quart represented 
grievous discomfort to the prosperous townsmen or 
yeomen of Taunton Dean, and as summer drew near, it 
became likely that worse was in store for them. A 



Three Sieges 29 

local tradition tells how they were reduced to their last 
pig, and how Blake, with more ingenuity than humanity, 
caused the poor beast to be whipped at different parts of 
the walls, in order that its squeals might mislead the 
besiegers into thinking that the town had still whole 
herds to feed on. If the author of the splayfooted 
' Encomiastik ' published after Blake's death is to be 
believed, he gave the Royalists a kinder proof of the 
abundance of his resources. Sir John Berkeley sent 
in a trumpeter to summon the town. His message 
was answered as Wyndham's had been, and then the 
Parliamentary colonel gave the messenger, who was in 
a very ragged state, a new suit of clothes. The object 
of this patronising piece of kindness was undoubtedly 
to irritate the Royalists, but the trumpeter's gain was 
clear. Meanwhile, Blake missed no opportunity of in- 
forming the Parliament of the dangerous position of the 
town, and of asking for help. He seems to have found 
little difficulty in communicating with London, by means 
of messengers who slipped through the Royalist lines. 
The Parliament was fully aware of the importance of 
relieving Taunton, and answered his appeals by votes of 
thanks and promises of assistance. It was easier, how- 
ever, to promise help than to send it. The quarrel between 
Manchester and Cromwell, between the Presbyterians 
and the root and branch men, had come to a head in 
the spring of 1645, and had caused a temporary para- 
lysis of the Parliamentary armies. The self-denying 
ordinance had for a moment disorganised their forces, 
and Sir Thomas Fairfax was engaged in forming the 
New Model at Windsor. This invincible body was 
destined to bring swift ruin on the King, but Sir John 



30 Robert Blake 

Berkeley's blockade was beginning to press keavily on 
Taunton before it was ready to take the field. 

In tke beginning of May, the time had at last come. 
Sir Thomas Fairfax reported his army ready for service, 
and was at once ordered to march to raise the siege 
of Taunton. He broke up from Windsor, and advanced 
with his whole force to Blandford. Here messengers from 
London stopped him with the news that the King had 
drawn his army out from Oxford, and was threatening 
the city itself. He was therefore ordered to return with 
the bulk of his troops, and to detach a portion only to 
Taunton. Fairfax consequently advanced out of Bland- 
ford on the road to Dorchester, and then turned east- 
ward, after providing for the service in the West. ' Ac- 
cordingly,' says Sprigge, ' a Brigade is appointed for 
Taunton, of four regiments of foot, viz. Colonel Welden's, 
Colonel Fortescue's, Colonel Floyd's, and Colonel In- 
glesby's; commanded by Colonel Welden as eldest 
colonel ; unto whom six companies of foot belonging to 
the garrison of Chichester joined themselves about 
Dorchester, and as many colours from Lyme (Blake's 
old comrades) after that ; in all about 4 or 5,000 foot, 
besides a body of horse of 1,800 or 2,000, consisting 
of Colonel Graves his regiment. Colonel Cook's, Colonel 
Popham's, Colonel Fitz-James's, and the Plymouth 
regiment. All which, horse and foot, were well combined 
in mutual love to each other and common resolution 
against the enemy.' With this high-sj)irited and united 
body, Welden advanced by forced marches to within ten 
miles of Taunton, to a post on the hills, and there by a 
preconcerted signal informed Blake that he was at hand 
to help him in driving off Sir John Berkeley. 



Three Sieges 31 

There was, however, no need for fighting. The 
news of Fairfax's advance to Blandford had been brought 
to Sir John, and he at once saw that the decisive mo- 
ment had arrived. Believing that he would soon have 
the whole Parliamentary army upon him, he decided on 
making a last attempt to get the town. A few days 
before Welden reached the neighbourhood, the Royalist 
general divided his force ; one part was ordered to re- 
move to the eastward, and then return as if it were a 
Parliamentary army, and make a sham attack on the 
besiegers. The object of this stratagem was to draw 
Blake out to help his supposed friends, when the whole 
Royalist party might have fallen on him. As the 
Parliamentary commander was very well informed of 
Weld en's movements, and did not hear the signal agreed 
on, he kept to his lines. Whereupon the enemy seeing 
their wisdom turned to foolishness, ' fell,' in the words 
of Sprigge, ' to firing the town with their granadoes 
and mortar-pieces, whereby two long streets of the 
town, of fair buildings, were burnt to the ground, and 
withal they stormed most furiously. But they met 
with a gallant commander-in-chief in Colonel Blake, 
and as valiant soldiers, that gave them such showers of 
lead as filled the trenches with their dead carcases.' 
The repulse was complete, but the Royalists seem on this 
occasion to have entered the town, and to have been 
beaten out after fierce fighting. In this last encounter, 
tradition, reported by the dubious Oldmixon, tells how 
one Bawdon, a Parliamentary ofiicer, had his thumb 
shot ofi" while engaged in driving out the Royalists, and 
' protested that the rogues should not carry it away with 
. them,' which one does not suppose they would be likely 



32 Robert Blake 

to do. Bawdoii was of another opinion, and remained, 
searching for his lost thumb. One of a Royalist party, 
which had barricaded itself in an alehouse, and accord- 
ing to the puritan story, were tippling in the midst of 
all this fury, saw him and shot at him, so that he died 
a revolutionary victim to the rights of property. It is 
also recorded that while Blake was fighting on the walls 
the pious and painful Mr. Welman did his part in the 
defence by expounding Malachi iii. 6, ' And who may 
abide the day of his coming ? and who shall stand when 
he appeareth ? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like 
fuller's soap.' 

After this repulse Sir John Berkeley did not wait 
for the approach of the Parliamentary forces. In the 
belief, as he averred, that Sir Thomas Fairfax's whole 
army was marching on him, he broke up his camp in 
haste and disorder, and marched ofi", cutting down trees 
to barricade the roads behind him. With the storm of 
the 11th and Welden's entry on May 14th, the most 
trying part of the siege was over, but Taunton had not 
yet seen the last of the Royalists. As soon as Goring 
learnt the smallness of Welden's forces, he collected his 
troops and surrounded the town again. There he 
remained deaf to the King's appeals for help in the 
Midlands, alleging as his excuse for inaction that he 
could not leave Taunton in the hands of the enemy, and 
boasting that he would soon compel it to capitulate. 
The presence of Welden's troops in the town frightened 
the Royalists from trying an assault, though they were 
able to drive the garrison in when it attempted to sally, 
but it made the strain on the provisions very heavy. 
Towards the middle of June things were as bad as ever. 



Three Sieges 33 

Blake and Welden were sending pressing messages 
for relief, and representing tliat their ammunition was 
running short. The Parliament promptly voted a new 
force for the relief, and Massey the Presbyterian, who 
was somewhat in disgrace since Manchester's downfall, 
was appointed to the command. He had no opportunity 
of distinguishing himself in this new post. The great 
victory at Naseby on June 14 had totally disabled the 
King from threatening London, and left Fairfax at 
liberty to march westward. On June 28 he was at 
Marlborough in Wiltshire. He reached Blandford in 
Dorset on July 2, .and was. thqre joined by Massey with 
the new levi©'^. "Here he learnt tha't Goring jbad already 
burnt his huts and ^i^wn off to,^lackdo;^n on the 
borders of D^iji^hire. At Dorchester, ^.ic^' he reached 
next day, the n^;^ ^^s* /^QijJ.pij,e^, (t^icl .jjHsoners taken 
by a party of his ""fi^iss^iii&ese^fiie gave him the 
further good news that the Eoyalists had retreated by 
Ilminster to Langport. Fairfax, with his troops in 
admirable order and spirit, advanced by Beaminster to 
Taunton, and the siege was at an end. 

The remaining military services of Blake on shore 
were confined to the blockade of Dunster, a stronghold 
of the Luterels at the east end of Exmoor, and to the 
discharge of his duties as governor of Taunton. The 
castle was once relieved by a body of Royalist horse, who 
slipped through while a part of the blockading force had 
been drawn off to Corfe Castle. Blake was not able to 
oppose the relief, but he took his revenge on their 
return. With the help of the country people he fell 
upon the rear of the Eoyalists and cut them up severely. 
The castle surrendered early in 1646, when the capitu- 

D 



34 



Robert Blake 



lation of Barnsfcaple enabled Fairfax to despatch two 
regiments of foot to Blake's assistance. In the course 
of the year he entered the Long Parliament for Taunton 
as a ^ recruiter' in place of Sir William Portman, who 
had been expelled for malignancy. As a member of 
Parliament he was compelled to resign his military com- 
mand by the self-denying ordinance, and, indeed, there 
were no longer any troops which he could command. 
The House recognised his services by a vote of 500Z., 
and rewarded Taunton by a gift of 1,000L to help it to 
rebuild its ruined houses. After the surrender of 
Hopton, the local Parliamentary forces in the West 
were disbanded, and the New Model alone remained on 
foot. The first civil war was over. 



35 



CHAPTER III. 

THE NAVY OF THE COMMONWEALTH. 

If Blake had died within two years after his defence of 
Taunton, he would only have been remembered with the 
Parliamentary officers of the second rank, with Skippon, 
Brereton, or Massey. His career in the House was 
obscure. He does not appear to have taken any part 
in the growing quarrel between the Presbyterians and 
the Independents. In the spring of 1648, however, 
the beginning of the second civil war opened to him a 
new field, and he began the great career in which he won 
in some respects the most enviable reputation gained by 
any man of his generation. In May of that year the 
squadron in the Downs revolted and passed over to the 
Prince of Wales in Holland. This disaster forced upon 
the Parliament the necessity of j)utting the navy into 
thoroughly trustworthy hands, and on February 24, 
16-4|- (o.s.) a commission was issued 'to Colonel Popham, 
Colonel Blake, and Colonel Deane, or any two of them, 
to be Admirals and Generals of the fleet now at sea.' 
The Committee of the Navy decided that they were to 
rank in the order in which their names were written in 
the commission, so that Blake began his naval services 
as second in command of the national fleet. 

D 2 



36 Robert Blake 

Tlie navy to whicli Blake's services were so suddenly, 
andj according to modern practice, so strangely trans- 
ferred, was, strictly speaking, tlie force we know by the 
name to-day. It was a permanent armament kept on 
foot in time of peace, and governed by officials in con- 
tinual employment, not like the armies of the time, a 
body raised for a special war, and disbanded when the 
fighting was over. In spite of this continuity, however, 
the superficial differences are so great that the navies seem 
separate bodies rather than the same at two stages of its 
development. The great change which has come over 
the material part divides them even less than the dis- 
similarity in their organisation. To-day the navy is 
commanded by specially educated officers, and manned 
by seamen who are a strictly professional body. From 
the Admiral of the Fleet down to the youngest boy 
just sent from the ' St. Vincent,' everybody has a well- 
defined place to fill, a rigidly fixed set of duties to 
perform, a career laid out for him, and a certainty that 
if he ' sticks to the service ' the State will provide for 
him, not very generously perhaps, but at least surely, as 
long as he lives. His dress is cut and marked according 
to rule, and shows his exact rank. The ship he serves 
in must be painted in a certain way. Such and such 
kinds of furniture are allowed, while others are not. 
The naval seaman of to-day lives in a world severely 
regulated by law, and his course is marked out for him 
by a code of some magnitude. He is no mere machine, 
but he is a part of a great and complicated organi- 
sation. 

In the seventeenth century all this either did not 
exist or existed only in germ. There was a fixed centre 



The Navy of the Commonwealth 37 

of administration at Whitehall, and in the dockyards, 
but outside of that everything was unsettled or regulated 
only by the custom of the sea. The mere fact that no 
uniform was selected for the navy till the middle of the 
eighteenth century is enough to show how vague was 
its organisation. There was, indeed, no regular body 
of naval officers till the close of the seventeenth century. 
Some men did spend their lives in the navy, but even 
they were trusted personal servants of the King rather 
than members of a corps of officers. Until the end 
of the seventeenth century, it was not even thought 
necessary that an admiral or captain should be a seaman. 
In very early days the King's fleets were composed for 
the most part of merchantmen impressed for the war. 
The master and crew were taken with their vessel, and 
it was their duty to navigate her. The captain and his 
lieutenant were officers in command of soldiers put on 
board, not to sail the ship, but to fight her. This rough 
and ready system had begun to fall into disfavour with 
good judges as early as Elizabeth's time. Many, though 
by no means all of her captains, were seamen, but the 
old practice lived on with the usual pertinacity of an 
English custom. In face of the glorious record of her 
times, and the triumphs of the navy of the Common- 
wealth, it is impossible to say that the system was wholly 
bad. No doubt a sensible landsman left his master to 
handle the ship, and confined himself to ordering where 
he was to take her. When Monk, in the excitement of 
battle, forgot he was no longer a colonel of cavalry, and 
roared out to his crew the order to wheel to the left, the 
sailors laughed, but the master interpreted his meaning 
to the man at the helm, and the ship was duly laid 



38 Robert Blake 

alongside the Dutchman. Still, a system whicli left the 
captain so much at the mercy of a subordinate was bad, 
and became inevitably worse in proportion as naval war- 
fare became more a matter of manoeuvring. Sir William 
Monson, the author of the ' Naval Tracts,' and one of 
the last survivors of the great Elizabethan generation, 
had pointed out the superiority of the seaman captains 
long before Blake's time. During the Commonwealth it 
seems to have been the rule to give the command of 
ships to sailors. In the reign of Charles the ordinary 
establishment of a ' capital ' ship, a ship of the line, was 
a captain, a lieutenant (though there was no officer of 
this rank in the smaller class of vessels), a master, a 
pilot, and a varying number of master's mates. The pay 
of a captain ranged, according to the size of his vessel, 
from 4L ^8. Sc?. a month to 14?., to which was added 
some very uncertain perquisites for carrying treasure, 
giving convoy, and so forth. A lieutenant received from 
2L 16s. to 3L 10s. ; a master from 11. ^s. Sd. to 
4Z. 13s. 9d. ; a pilot from 11. 3s. 4cL to 21. 5s., and the 
master's mates from 1?. 3s. M. to 21. 5s. a month. This 
pay lasted only as long as the ship was in commission. 
When once she was paid off, officers and crew might 
shift for themselves. 

The navy was manned, as it continued to be down 
to this century, by voluntary engagement, largely tem- 
pered by the pressgang. Men were taken for the 
commission, and paid at the end, the wages of a 
common man being 15s. a month, with his rations. The 
Parliament raised their pay to 11. At the end of the 
century the weekly allowance of a sailor was 'seven 
pounds of biscuit, seven gallons of beer, four pounds 



The Navy of the Commonwealth 39 

of beef, two pounds of pork, one quart of peas, 
three pints of oatmeal, six ounces of butter, and 
twelve ounces of clieese, and besides, all ttie fresli fish 
which is caught, without any deduction for it.' Eum 
as yet was not, but always providing the stores were 
good, these rations were amply sufficient to keep a man 
in health and strength. In the main, the adminis- 
tration of the navy under Charles and the Common- 
wealth was honest. There were peculation and mis- 
management, but neither reached the scandalous height 
they attained after the Kestoration. In one respect 
the seaman of the early seventeenth century was better 
off than the men who manned the fleets of Hawke and 
Eodney. The commissions were short. There were 
no foreign stations. At home the fleet was equipped 
for the ' winter and summer guards,' such lasting only 
a few months. As yet the practice of paying ojff at 
the end of a commission did not mean that the crew 
were kept waiting for years, imprisoned on board at 
the mercy of money-lending pursers who made advances 
at usurious interest. Neither does the cat seem to have 
been used with the freedom of later days. Punishments 
were rough. The custom of the seas allowed of great 
ferocity in the case of such offences as stabbing and 
robbery, but there were no floggings of two and three 
hundred lashes for small delinquencies. In fact, in days 
when the Spanish Main was open to a crew of adventu- 
rous spirits, a captain might hesitate before indulging 
in the kind of brutality which drove the crew of the 
^ Hermione ' into mutiny. 

The system of the seventeenth century was a 
fairly good one for the time. It had to be carried 



40 Robert Blake 

on into wholly different circumstances before it pro- 
duced the abuses which, in their turn, produced the 
mutiny at Spithead. The Commonwealth was indeed 
exceptionally favourable to the seamen. Its gen- 
erally vigorous policy induced it to promote the 
general interests of the country, and its kindness was 
stimulated by purely selfish motives. After the mutiny 
in the Downs, the Parliament had need to attach the 
sailors to itself by good pay and good treatment. 

To form an idea of the ships of that time from any- 
thing which now floats is almost impossible. A com- 
parison with a steamer would of course be absurd, but 
even the great sailing clippers of to-day are so widely 
different as to be utterly unlike. They are longer, 
narrower, simpler in form, and far more elaborately 
rigged. If we wish to realise the sort of vessel which 
carried Blake's flag, perhaps the best way would be to 
pay a visit to the ' Victory ' at Portsmouth, and then to 
the model rooms at Greenwich. The deck of Nelson's 
flagship looks small when seen from the poop, and the 
^ George ' would have looked far smaller. She was even 
broader in proportion to her length, and built higher 
out of the water. Few of the ships of the navy in 1648 
were of over a thousand tons. These comparatively 
small vessels were more imposing than they would seem 
likely to have been from their mere size. Look at the 
model of the ' Poyal Sovereign ' (Mr. Peter Pett's great 
ship) at Greenwich, or at the ' Bristol ' of 60 guns, 
which lived to be taken by Duguay-Trouin, or at the 
nameless 50-gun ship built in 1650. The stern towers 
up, broad at the water line and narrow above. Here 
there is a thin strip of deck from side to side. From 



The Navy of the Commonwealth 41 

below this runs out au other deck, with a slight down- 
ward slope, which ends before the mizen mast. This 
is the poop. From under this again comes out another, 
which ends just before the main, and is known as the 
quarter-deck. Standing on the edge of this, one would 
look down on what, with some apparent absurdity, is 
called the upper deck, because it was the highest of all 
which ran the whole length of the vessel. Under this 
was the main deck, which in the case of the great ships 
carried guns. From either side of the quarter-deck two 
narrow gangways ran forward, and ended in the fore- 
castle. This was then exactly what its name implies — a 
solid square fort rising from the level of the upper deck, 
rather higher than the poop, carrying guns, and capable 
of being defended even if the rest of the ship was in 
possession of an enemy. These vessels were armed 
with from thirty-six to seventy guns, ranging from six 
to forty-eight pounders. The English ordnance of that 
time was famous for its excellence, which may have had 
something to do with inducing the Admiralty to over- 
gun their ships, to the ruin of their sailing powers. It 
is also to be noted that the English men-of-war of the 
seventeenth century were the best built vessels of their 
time. They were stronger than the Dutch, in which 
timber was spared from motives of economy, and they 
drew more water. The mediaeval love of adorning 
weapons and ships still survived. Our war vessels, and 
those of other nations, were elaborately ornamented. 
Mr. Pett covered the stern, sides, and bows of his ' Eoyal 
Sovereign ' with graven images of Neptune, Father 
Thames, the Genius of England, Valour, Fortitude, and 
His Sacred Majesty. She was a show ship, but even 



42 Robert Blake 

smaller vessels were covered with wood carving, and liad 
gilded laurel wreaths round tlie upper ports. The rigging 
had just reached a stage short of its complete develop- 
ment. Three-masted vessels carried courses, topsails, 
and topgallant sails. The place of the spanker on the 
mizen was occupied by a lateen sail, and the bowsprit, 
which rose from under the front side of the forecastle 
at a sharp angle, had a small mast stepped at the end, 
carrying a square sail known as the sprit. 

' The seamen are in a manner a nation by them- 
selves, a humorous, brave, and sturdy people; fierce 
and resolute in whatsoever they are inclined to, some- 
what unsteady and inconstant in pursuing it, and jealous 
of those to-morrow by whom they are governed to-day.' 
Clarendon's well-known description has been true of 
the sailor from Chaucer's time to Marryat's. In the 
early seventeenth century, the crews which manned 
our ships had need to be brave and sturdy, fierce and 
resolute, for they were a nation which was always at 
war. The reigns of James and Charles are commonly 
dismissed as a barren period in the history of the navy, 
and not unjustly. The expeditions of these sovereigns 
were all unfortunate, and the attack on Cadiz in 1626 
was disgraced by mutiny, and even by cowardice. Still 
both did much to increase the strength of the navy. 
They even did something for the training of the men 
by fitting out fleets, though little use was made of them 
when at sea. The dockyards and the Admiralty must 
at least have been well practised in their duties. Ofiicers 
and men must have learnt something during these 
cruises. 

It was not, however, in the Koyal navy that the sea- 



The Navy of the Commonwealth 43 

men who conquered the fleets of Holland were trained, 
but on board the mercbant ships which made the over- 
sea voyages. In our times a South Sea chief cannot 
pillage a boat's crew without bringing upon himself 
the visit of a cruiser, but in the seventeenth century- 
traders had to depend on themselves for protection. 
They went ' upon the sea on their lawful occasions,' with 
the distinct understanding that they had little or no 
assistance to expect from their Government. There was 
no peace on the sea. 

Very early in James's reign the Earl of Salisbury 
asked a deputation of merchants who came to complain 
of the outrageous violence of a Spanish Viceroy of 
Sicily, whether they really expected the King to go 
to war whenever one of their ships was pillaged in the 
Levant. The merchants acknowledged that it would 
be an absurd pretension. All they asked was that 
the King would do his best for them by expostula- 
tion and bargain. For the rest they agreed that 
Englishmen who went far abroad for gain did so at 
their risk and peril. The adventurer had not far to go 
to meet enemies. Even the narrow seas, over which 
the King of England claimed sovereignty, swarmed with 
pirates. The privateers of Dunkerque who sailed under 
the flag of Spain against the trade of Holland were 
ready enough to overstep their commissions. Gentle- 
men of all nations who were in trouble took to the sea, 
as they took in after days to the road. ' Qui disait marin 
disait forban,' as Admiral Paris puts it, and not only 
privateers, but even merchantmen were not scrupulous 
about turning pirate. Piracy was a business. The 
Earl of Warwick, afterwards the Parliament's Admiral 



44 Robert Blake 

in the Civil War, did a large speculation in vessels which 
were called privateers, but which plundered all traders 
impartially under the flag of any obscure potentate 
who happened to be at war. When the narrow seas 
were left, the skipper knew he was sailing into the 
cruising grounds of other foes. In America, the coasts 
of New England and Virginia might be safe, but the 
long fight with France had begun to the north, and to 
the south were the possessions of Spain. The foreigner 
who sailed to the west of Pope Alexander's line, to take 
his share of the lucrative contraband trade, went with 
a sample of woollen goods in one hand and a boarding 
pike in the other. From armed smuggler to buccaneer 
was a short step, as may be seen from Dampier's 
history of the ' Cygnet ' of London. The Sallee rovers 
lay in wait outside the Straits of Gibraltar. Within 
the Mediterranean was the great pirate stronghold of 
Algiers. Adventurers of all nations sailed from it to 
plunder indiscriminately. Two Englishmen at least, a 
deserter named Ward, and a gentleman of the ancient 
house of Yerney, were famous among these sea-robbers. 
Verney came home, and was thought rather to have 
shown himself a credit to his family. The Murad 
Keis who sacked Baltimore in Ireland — for the Algerines 
cruised openly on the ocean — was a Fleming. Beyond 
Algiers were Tunis and Tripoli. The ships of the East 
India Company had to expect the armed opposition of 
Portuguese or Dutchmen on the coast of Coromandel 
or Malabar and among the Spice Islands. Factors and 
skippers of the three nations fought and made alliances, 
in complete indifference as to whether their countries 
were at war, or not, in Europe. Then, too, there were 



The Navy of the Commonwealth 45 

native princes or Turkish pashas who would plunder if 
they could. 

With so many foes waiting to pounce on him, the 
sailor had need to go armed, and to be prepared to 
stand on his defence. Accordingly the ships employed 
in the Indian, American, and Levant voyages were well 
supplied with guns and carried large crews. They 
had their gunners and armourers, and the crews were 
drilled at quarters. Often enough they were over- 
powered, and all who escaped death were swept into 
captivity. 

The Privy Council received every year a long list of 
piteous complaints and appeals from unfortunate men 
who were in the bagnios of Algiers. The charitable 
were periodically called on to subscribe for the ransom 
of captives. Nor was Algiers the only or even the 
worst place of imprisonment to which his ill-luck might 
lead the sailor. The fate of Captain Nathaniel Court- 
hope and of the factors at Amboyna shows that 
the Dutch of the Spice Islands could be as ferocious 
as the renegades of the Mediterranean. Even when 
Spain was most anxious to be on good terms with the 
King of England, the Inquisition seized every chance 
of laying its hands on heretics. Still, in defiance of 
death, wounds, and imprisonment, English sailors rushed 
into every trade with such success, that the commerce of 
the country increased very greatly between the death 
of Elizabeth and the outbreak of the Civil War. Being 
left almost without protection by the Koyal fleet, they 
protected themselves. They were rarely taken without 
a fight, and in many cases they resisted with success. 
Accounts of these feats were published, and one, a 



46 Robert Blake 

particularly good specimen of its kind, was dedicated 
to Prince Henry, and rhymed by Taylor, the Water 
Poet. It tells how in 1616 the 'Dolphin' of London 
beat off a little squadron of Algerines on the coast of 
Sardinia. The pirates surrounded and boarded her. 
At their head were two English renegades. The pirates 
were in overwhelming force, but they attacked in detail, 
and were repulsed one after another. At last, when 
two of their vessels had been well riddled by the 
* Dolphin's ' guns, when the valiant merchant ship was 
on fire, but her crew still resisted, ' choosing rather to 
die than yield, as it is still the nature and condition 
of all Englishmen,' the Algerines drew off. The ' Dol- 
phin's ' ' boatswain (seeing them fly) most undauntedly 
with a whistle dared them to the skirmish if so they 
durst.' But they durst not, and the ' Dolphin,' badly 
cut up as she was, crawled into safety under the 
Sardinian batteries. In the East Indies the fight- 
ing was incessant and merciless. Sir Henry Middleton 
blockaded Aden in revenge for some violent proceedings 
of the pasha's. A squadron of the Company's ships 
helped Shah Abbas of Persia to take Ormuz from the 
Portuguese, who were our obstinate enemies in those 
regions. The history of the Company's first voyages is 
full of accounts of actions with the fleets of this power, 
in which no quarter was given. Later on, when Por- 
tugal had ceased to be formidable, began the long 
quarrel with Holland, which was equally furious but 
less successful. 

All this was very irregular, undoubtedly, but it was 
capital training. It familiarised men with war, and 
accustomed them to submit to discipline. The crews 



The Navy of the Commonwealth 47 

of tlie ' Dolphin ' and of tlie Indiamen must have had 
the root of the matter in them. It was well that they 
should, for they had long scores to clear off with Por- 
tuguese, Spaniards, and Dutchmen. Under a resolute 
Government and vigorous leaders, they were about to 
have an opportunity to fight out what was peculiarly 
their quarrel. 



48 Robert Blake 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PURSUIT OF RUPERT. 

Blake's first naval services were against a domestic 
enemy. It fell to Mm to crush tlie feeble remnants of 
the Royalist party. After the fall of Colchester and 
the defeat of the Duke of Hamilton at Preston, the 
King's followers were completely conquered in England, 
but though driven from the mainland, they still con- 
tinued to fight on the sea. Carteret and Greenvil held 
Jersey and the Scilly Islands. From their ports cruisers 
sailed to prey on the commerce of the rebels, that is to 
say, of all England. In the ports of Holland Prince 
Rupert commanded a remnant of the squadron which 
had revolted against the Parliament in the previous 
year. Most of the ships, and a large majority of the 
men, had been induced to return to their duty, or to 
fall back into their treason (either phrase can be used 
according to the point of view) by the Earl of Warwick. 
Three large vessels, the ' Convertine,' the ' Antelope,' 
the ' Swallow,' and four frigates remained in the hands 
of the King's friends. After much wrangling between 
the Duke of York, who was nominally Lord High 
Admiral, and the Prince of Wales or the Prince's 
servants \ after fights among themselves, futile efibrts 



The Pursuit of Rupert 49 

to help the imprisoned King, riots in Helvoet Sluys 
with the Dutch, and spurts of fighting with the Parlia- 
ment's blockading squadron, a compromise had been 
arrived at by the divided Royalists. The poor remnant 
of the squadron which was to have reconquered England 
was put under the command of Prince Rupert, to be 
used for the King's service, with a reservation of the 
Duke of York's rights as Lord High Admiral. Only 
one use could be made of this force. Even the most 
sanguine of the Royalist refugees could not hope to 
produce any impression on the power of the Parliament 
with three ' capital ships ' and four small cruisers, manned 
by broken men and indifierently equipped by expedients 
of every kind. If this squadron could not do anything 
else, however, it could plunder, and its prizes could be 
sold for the benefit of the exiled Court. The monarchical 
governments of the Continent were not as yet sufficiently 
afraid of the Commonwealth to refuse Charles the use 
of their ports. With a folly scarcely to be justified by 
their extreme penury, Charles and his advisers decided 
to offend the whole trading community of England by 
putting themselves on a level with the pirates of Algiers. 
Their enterprise was delayed for a time by the very 
penury it was designed to relieve. The squadron was 
to make money, but money was needed to equip the 
squadron. Prince Rupert got over this difficulty in a 
masterly manner. He sold the guns of the ' Antelope,' 
and fitted out two of his frigates with the proceeds. 
These cruisers, the ' Guinea ' frigate, of 300 tons and 
thirty guns, under Captain Allen (one of Charles's 
admirals after the Restoration) and the ' Roebuck,' of 
120 tons and fourteen guns, Captain Marshall, sailed 

E 



50 



Robert Blake 



from Helvoet Sluys. In a few days they returned with 
a collier valued at 800^, and a Yarmouth ship. With 
these firstfruits of their industry the Koyalist officers 
equipped the other ships, and in January of 1649 Eupert 
stood to sea with his seven vessels and the prize. His 
first stroke of business was innocent enough. He gave 
convoy down the Channel to some Dutch merchant- 
men, and then steered for Kinsale, where the King's 
flag was still flying. From that time till the end of 
his wild cruise, his friends heard little from Eupert the 
Devil, as his sister Sophia calls him in a letter intercepted 
by the Parliament. 

The loud outcries of the merchants would soon have 
forced the Parliament to take active measures against 
Eupert, even if a regard for its own interests had not 
been enough to drive it into vigorous exertions. Some 
time had to pass, however, before a sufficient squadron 
could be got ready for sea. The mutiny of the previous 
summer had greatly disorganised the service, and the 
rapid changes of the second civil war had thrown the 
whole government out of gear. In 1649 the Parliament 
had to begin by establishing a naval administration. 
An Admiralty Committee, of which Sir Harry Vane 
was the ablest and the most industrious member, was 
formed to work under the Council of State. In keeping 
with its general practice, the Parliament seems to have 
attempted to put even the fleet at sea under the 
command of a committee. Popham, Blake, and Deane 
were expected to act together, and even to sail in the 
same ship. The necessities of the service made it im- 
possible for all three to keep together, but throughout 
1649 Blake is found acting either with Popham or 



The Pursuit of Rupert 5 1 

with Deane. Their commission, issued in February, 
was in the widest terms, and was accompanied by 
instructions worded with all the vigour and precision 
which distinguished the orders of the Council of State 
when the work in hand was the suppression of the 
Koyalists. They were told, with much official detail, 
to go anywhere and do anything they might find 
necessary ' to oppose and suppress whoever maintains 
the title of Charles Stuart, eldest son to the late King, 
or any of his issue claiming a title to the Crown.' 

The first thing to be done was to take measures of 
precaution against another mutiny. On March 3 the 
Admirals had orders to prepare a ' form of engagement ' 
to bind the officers and mariners to ' this Parliament,' 
and the support of a Government without King or 
House of Lords. Then came the long business of fit- 
ting the squadron for sea. Two months were spent in 
this task, during which time Blake and Deane were 
continually writing to the Admiralty Committee for 
cases of pistols, hatchets, cables, anchors, flags, or men. 
In the middle of all this official correspondence is one 
letter which may be said to be, by comparison, personal 
and interesting. On April 3 the Admirals inform the 
Committee that Colonel Blake, as he was still called, 
had sent to Lyme for Eich. Squire, Jonathan Pook, 
and Jas. Pelsor to join their flagship, the ' Triumph.' 
It is hardly a guess that these were men known to 
Blake in the old days of the siege as tall fellows and 
good men of their hands, such as an officer in need of 
stout and trustworthy followers would like to have by 
him in trying times. By the middle of April the fleet 
was in the Downs, and in May it was in Plymouth 

. E 2 



52 - Robert Blake 

Sound. Blake, who was a loyal Bridge water man, and 
wlio always bought his own stores in his native town, 
vv^ould get his favourite Somersetshire bread and cheese 
and beer very conveniently at Plymouth. 

During the summer of 1649 Blake and Deane were 
engaged in the dreary work of blockading on the Irish 
coast. The diaries of Sir William Penn, who saw much 
of that service, can still be read, and they are a speak- 
ing testimony to the tedium of this, the most wearisome 
part of the languid Irish wars. Eupert kept his ships 
carefully in Kinsale harbour, not having ' devil ' enough 
in him to try the frantic adventure of attacking the 
strong and well-appointed Parliamentary squadron at 
sea. He had his troubles, but they came mainly from the 
land. The crews of the King's ships grew discontented 
with idleness and want of pay. Worse than the mutinous 
conduct of his own men was the downfall of the Royal 
cause in Ireland. The victory of Michael Jones outside 
of Dublin, and Cromwell's dreadful march, made it clear 
that Kinsale would not long be tenable. With falling 
fortunes came their usual consequence in Ireland, 
treason and divisions. Rupert found, or professed to 
find, that he could not trust the officer in charge of the 
fort at Kinsale. He therefore seized it himself. The 
fort would have stood him in little stead if Cromwell 
had come down on Kinsale while Blake and Deane were 
off the port. Bad weather came to his assistance. The 
autumn storms compelled the Parliamentary officers to 
withdraw from the dangerous coast, and Rupert slipped 
out with his seven ships. It would have been too rash 
to make for the Channel Islands, though Carteret still 
5ield them for the King, and the Prince accordingly 



T HE Pursuit of Rupert 53 

sailed for tlie coast of Portugal. In November lie 
readied Lisbon, a fatal guest, bringing with liim several 
English prizes captured off the Ber lings by his brother 
Maurice. 

Blake's services during this summer can only be 
guessed at. A blockade has but a colourless history. 
In November a letter from Deane reports that ' my 
partner Blake' is on the coast of Munster, with the 
' Guinea ' frigate and the ' Nonsuch.' He must have 
maintained his reputation if he did not increase it, for 
in the course of October he received an offer from one 
who well knew how to choose men for command. By 
a Parliamentary order in that month, he was, ' at the 
instance of the Lord General of Ireland,' Oliver Crom- 
well, offered the choice of keeping his sea command or 
taking a Major Generalship on shore. If he selected 
the latter post he was to have help in raising a regi- 
ment. The offer was either declined or recalled, for 
Parliament soon had need for his services on blue water. 
The news of Rupert's presence on the coast of Portugal 
induced the Council of State to fit out a fleet for the 
south, and Blake was chosen for the command in 
December of 1649. Popham being needed in the 
Channel, and Deane being ill, he was to go alone. 

Another period of preparation preceded the next cam- 
paign. During the last month of 1649 and the first of 
1650, Blake was hard at work fitting his squadron for 
sea. The rendezvous was in Stokes Bay, where he met 
Popham, who was to keep an eye on the Channel, and the 
two rapidly settled the details of the service. In the 
previous summer, the Council of State had been some- 
what doubtful as to its power of keeping up a strong 



54 Robert BlakA 

naval force for long, and had been urgent on the 
admirals to do something towards ' breaking the head 
and pulling up the roots of the enemy's marine strength 
in Prince Eupert.' These doubts had disappeared by 
the end of the year. New ships had been equipped, and 
armed merchantmen had been levied in some numbers. 
In March 1650 the Parliament had forty-seven war- 
ships and twenty hired merchant ships in commission, 
over and above the seventeen war-ships and two fire- 
ships or ketches blockading Lisbon. By the middle of 
February Blake was on his way south, and it was well 
known that he was commissioned for determined service. 
A Eoyal agent in England, whose letter was inter- 
cepted, reports on February 20 that Blake is at sea 
with fourteen ships, and will ^ renew the business of 
Helvoet Sluys in any prince's harbour.' ' The business 
of Helvoet Sluys ' was Warwick's attempt to destroy 
the mutinous squadron of 1648 in Dutch waters — a very 
high-handed proceeding. The Royalist spy was only 
repeating a matter of common knowledge when he in- 
formed his friends that the Parliamentary officer was 
ordered to strike hard, not only at Eupert, but at any 
power which allowed him to use its harbours. On 
January 7 the Council of State had issued ' additional 
instructions for the generals of the fleet for the southern 
expedition.' Nothing could be more explicit. ' Now,' 
so ran the peremptory words, ' this present fleet is sent 
forth for the intents following — viz. the suppressing of 
pirates, advantage of trade, encouraging of merchants, 
and securing their shipping at sea ; also to pursue, 
seize, scatter, fight with, or destroy all the ships of the 
revolted fleet.' Sink, drown, and destroy, is the burden 



The Pursuit of Rupert 55 

of tlie whole despatch. No doubt was left as to the 
course to be followed with foreigners guilty of too much 
friendship for Rupert. They were to be ' sunk, burnt, 
and destroyed/ but, and the qualification throws some 
light on the nature of naval warfare in those times, 
they were not to be killed in cold blood. For the rest, 
the Parliament claimed to have inherited all the rights 
of the King of England. Blake was ordered to insist 
on the salute due to the sovereigns of the seas. He was 
to call on all foreign ships to lower their topsails to 
the flag of England, always providing he was strong 
enough to enforce obedience. If not, he might pass 
over the offence, but was to report the names of the 
contumacious foreigners to the Council of State, so that 
they might be brought thereunto ' on a more fitting 
occasion.' The Commonwealth, though it did not ask 
its officers to try the impossible, was not one of those 
Governments which decline to take responsibility. On 
April 13 the Admiralty Committee writes more ' further 
instructions ' to Blake, putting its views as to the course 
to be taken with the King of Portugal beyond all ques- 
tion of a doubt. He was ordered to give his Faithful 
Majesty to understand that no right of asylum would 
be recognised in his waters as far as Rupert was con- 
cerned. The Admiralty Committee quoted ' Puffendorf 
and Grotius ' to show that the Prince and his squadron 
were not capable of neutrality. ' Quod piratae et 
latrones qui civitatem non faciunt jure gentium jussi 
non possunt,' and seeing that they were ' hostes humani 
generis ' were to be knocked on the head, and properly 
rooted out wherever found. If any foreign prince chose 
to protect such fellows, he did it at his peril. 



56 Robert Blakr 

In the first days of Marclij if not in the last days of 
February, Blake reached his cruising ground off Lisbon, 
and here he remained until the end of the year. 
During this period he had abundant opportunity of 
showing not only his vigilance, but that readiness to 
strike on provocation which Nelson called political 
courage. The pursuit of Rupert grew rapidly into an 
informal war with Portugal. This war sprang almost 
inevitably out of the very complicated relations of all 
the parties to the quarrel. The position of the Portu- 
guese king was indeed difficult. John of Braganza, 
the representative of an illegitimate branch of the house 
of Avis, had been as it were forced on to the throne of 
Portugal by the ambition of his wife, who had compelled 
him ten years before to have the courage to profit by 
the revolt against Spain. He was a narrow-minded 
and timid man, very ill fitted for a place requiring both 
nerve and judgment. Spain had not yet recognised the 
independence of Portugal, and was known to be pre- 
paring for an attempt to enforce its rights to preserve 
the monarchy left by Philip II. Feeble as Spain was, 
it was still stronger than Portugal. As yet, John of 
Braganza had no ally. When therefore he became 
suddenly entangled in the civil strife of Englishmen, it 
behoved him to look warily to his going, lest he should 
find that he had offended the stronger side, and so 
brought upon himself the hostility of a State which 
could give very material help to Spain. In November 
1649, when Rupert's ships entered the Tagus, it was 
not yet certain that the Parliament would be ultimately 
victorious. The crowning mercy of Worcester had not 
settled that question. John might therefore naturally 



The Pursuit of Rupert 57 

wisli to keep on good terms with tlie Stuarts. His 
sympathies, too, would carry him in that direction. 
Though the chief of a rebellion he claimed to represent 
the indefeasible rights of a royal line, and the execution 
of Charles I. must have seemed as horrible a piece of 
wickedness to him as to the most firmly established 
sovereign on the Continent. Charles II. was in his eyes 
already the true sovereign of England. Moreover, when 
the Hoyal squadron appeared off the Tagus in November 
1649, there seemed reason to believe that it might be 
found useful. The Parliament was known to be sending 
envoys to Spain, and it was natural for John to see in 
this an attempt to secure an alliance with his worst 
enemy. He might well suspect the rebellious Parlia- 
ment of a wish to secure recognition from an old State 
by helping in his ruin. Finally, and this cannot have 
been the weakest of the motives which influenced him, 
the Parliament's ships were far away, with enemies at 
home still unsubdued. The Royalist squadron was off 
his port, with prizes to be sold, its wants urging it on, 
its matches burning, and a leader with a well-established 
reputation for want of scruple at its head. If a refuge 
was refused, it might very possibly avenge itself by 
plundering Portuguese commerce, under the pretext 
that Portugal had become the ally of the Common- 
wealth. 

In an evil hour for himself, John of Braganza opened 
his harbour and arsenal to the refugees from Kinsale. 
Rupert was able to sell his jDrizes, and divide the pro- 
ceeds between his master in Holland and the refitting 
of his squadron. Before it was ready, Blake's sails were 
seen from Peniche, and the King of Portugal found 



58 Robert Blake 

Mmself between the devil and the deep sea. The 
Parliamentary officer insisted at once on the surrender 
of Eupert's ships, and on his own right to enter the 
Tagus. The King refused both requests. He could 
not submit to the ignominy of giving up his guests to 
be treated as pirates, while to have admitted Blake 
would have simply been to invite a repetition of the 
business of Helvoet Sluys. The actions of Tunis and 
Santa Cruz show how ready Blake was to attack fortifi- 
cations where there was any possibility of success, and 
if the thing had been feasible he would doubtless have 
shown the King of Portugal by diplomatic blows and 
knocks that ' piratse et latrones ' are not capable of neu- 
trality ; but, like Drake at an earlier period, he considered 
an attempt to force the heavily fortified entrance of so 
swift a river as the Tagus too rash. He therefore 
anchored outside. 

A war of stratagems now began between the two 
squadrons which lay within sight of one another. In the 
intervals of sending long documents to the King to prove 
one another pirates and enemies of the human race, the two 
Admirals made such attacks on each other as their con- 
fined positions allowed. Parliamentary officers per- 
suaded Rupert's men to desert. Royalist officers 
attacked Blake's boats when they came on shore for 
water. Rupert accused Blake of laying a plot to kidnap 
him, and retaliated by trying to blow up his flagship. 
A primitive but undoubted torpedo, made of a '- bomb 
ball in a double-headed barrel with a lock in the bowels 
to give fire to a quick match ' was to be taken alongside 
the ^ George ' in a fruit boat by a sailor in a Portuguese 
dress. The hasty use of an English word, we can guess 



The Pursuit of Rupert 59 

what it was, by tKe travestied Englishman excited sus- 
picion, and the infernal machine was seized. During all 
this time the King of Portugal sat by in feeble impo- 
tence, and was assailed by both sides with arguments 
and threats. Each of the foreigners too had his party 
in the Portuguese court. The Queen supported Rupert ; 
a body of his wiser courtiers, who had begun to see 
where the balance of strength lay, were eager to have 
peace made with the Commonwealth. They would have 
sent Rupert to Execution Dock with the utmost 
equanimity. 

The King, surrounded by factions and without fleet 
or money, had no power to exact respect from either of 
the strangers who had come to fight their quarrels out 
in his waters. The most he could do was to keep them 
from coming to actual blows in the Tagus. Blake was 
authorised not to tolerate even tacit hostility, and he 
soon had an opportunity of striking the Portuguese a 
shrewd blow. The Portuguese naval power had sunk 
so low that they were compelled to freight English ships 
to carry cargoes bound for their own colonies. When 
the Brazil fleet, with a very ill-advised confidence, put 
to sea, those of its vessels which were of English 
nationality were impressed by Blake for the service of 
the Commonwealth, and the Portuguese cargoes were 
sequestered. This, as the English Admiral informed 
the King, was only meant as a warning, and worse 
would follow if Rupert was not at once expelled. He 
threatened to seize the home-coming Brazil fleet which 
was due by the end of summer. 

This attack and its accompanying threat roused 
even the feeble court of Portugal. A great show was 



6o Robert Blake 

made of taking steps to avenge the insult. Ships were 
equipped, and Rupert was asked for help. The Prince 
was as ready as usual for the fray, though his crews had 
been much weakened by desertion, but nothing came of 
it all. The Portuguese ships would not fight, and 
Rupert's could not unless supported. ' M. La Touche 
has been cutting capers outside Sepet ' is a phrase which 
occurs frequently in Nelson's letters from the blockading 
fleet ofi" Toulon, and with the necessary change of names 
it describes this and the following sallies of Rupert's 
ships from the Tagus. He could not without manifest 
insanity venture far from the protection of the forts, 
while Blake could not risk his fleet under their guns. 
The whole thing ended in an ineffectual cannonade. 

In the course of September something very effectual 
was done. Blake had been reinforced by Popham with 
eight ships, and had received orders to seize all Portu- 
guese goods at sea. He therefore kept his word to 
King John, and attacked the home-coming Brazil fleet 
five miles off" the coast of Portugal. One was sunk, and 
a round dozen were captured, all richly laden with sugar 
and other colonial produce. The resistance seems to 
have been of the feeblest. This experience convinced 
John of Braganza that it was decidedly less dangerous 
to offend Rupert than to quarrel with the masters of 
England, and he began to make his peace in earnest. 
The Royalists were forced, or bribed by gifts of stores, 
to take themselves off", and they rid King John of their 
very costly presence by sailing for the Straits in 
October. 

This second escape of Rupert's squadron from a 
blockaded port was probably due to the foul state of 



The Pursuit of Rupert 6i 

the Parliament ships. In those days, before the value 
of copper sheeting had been discovered, no vessel could 
keep the sea for long without getting so covered with 
barnacles as to lose its sailing powers. "When Blake 
had given the Portuguese their lesson, he was doubtless 
glad enough to make for a friendly port, and so pro- 
ceeded to the Spanish port of San Lucar de Barrameda to 
careen. Perhaps, too, it was thought wise to meet the 
King of Portugal half-way, and spare him the humilia- 
tion of surrendering his guests. However that may 
have been, Kupert escaped. He ran through the Straits 
and sailed up the coast of Spain, appealing to the King 
as a nominal ally of his master for help, but with the 
ultimate intention of making for Toulon. As the 
historian of the voyage puts it, ' We take the confines of 
the Mediterranean for our harbour, poverty and despair 
being companions, and revenge our guide.' The appear- 
ance of Rupert in Spanish waters did something to 
secure attention for Clarendon and Oottington, who 
were acting as his master's ambassadors in Madrid, but 
he was not allowed to enter any harbour. His career 
here was short. After destroying some English merchant 
ships at Estepona and Malaga, and capturing one, the 
' Marmaduke ' of London, after a sharp fight at sea, 
he began to cruise between Cape de Gat and Palos. 
Meanwhile Blake, having scraped his ships, started in 
pursuit. In November 1650 he came up with the bulk 
of the Royalist squadron off Carthagena and attacked 
them at once. There was no battle deserving the name. 
Rupert had been compelled to impress men from English 
merchant ships, and they had no stomach for the fight 
in such a cause. Blake had little difficulty in capturing 



62 Robert Blake 

or driving on shore the whole squadron. When the 
work was done, it must have been a grievous dis- 
appointment to Blake to find that Eupert was not in 
the fleet. He was cruising when the disaster happened 
off Formentera, and had escaped again. From this 
point, however, he vanishes from the life of Eobert 
Blake. His arrival at Toulon, where he found his 
brother, his departure from the Mediterranean, his long 
stay on the coast of Africa, his attempts to persuade his 
companions to turn buccaneers, his quarrels with his 
followers, his perils among the Azores, his futile visit 
to the West Indies, his final escape in the tornado off 
the Virgin Isles, in which Maurice went down with 
man and mouse, and his safe arrival with one storm- 
battered ship at Nantes in 1653, cannot be told here. 

With the action off Carthagena, Blake's work in the 
Mediterranean was done for the present. He left Penn 
behind with a squadron to protect British shipping, and 
brought back the bulk of the fleet to the Channel. One 
piece of service he did before the action at Carthagena 
which must be noted, for it was of a kind it fell to his 
lot to do continuously, and on a larger scale, for the 
rest of his life. The French had profited by the un- 
protected state of English shipping during the latter 
part of the civil war to plunder traders to the Mediter- 
ranean, and had lately been suspected of an intention 
to help Eupert. During 1650 the Levant Company 
had made many and bitter complaints to the Council of 
State of the loss inflicted on them by French piracy. 
The time had gone by when the English Government 
was compelled to tolerate such outrages, or to leave 
merchant ships to protect themselves. Its Admiral, who 



The Pursuit of Rupert 63 

well knew that lie would be supported, even if he did 
not act by express orders, determined to teach the 
French a lesson as sharp as that which he had just 
taught the Portuguese. When in the Straits, on his 
way to attack Eupert, he fell in with four of their 
vessels, and captured them by way of reprisal. The 
officer in command of the French ships is reported, 
when summoned on board Blake's flagship, to have re- 
fused to surrender without resistance, and to have been 
told to go back and make the best fight he could. It 
does seem not to have been particularly good. The 
ships were taken, their cargoes were impounded, and the 
iVench Government was left to digest its warning. 



64 Robert Blake 



CHAPTER y. 

AND AT WHITEHALL. 

Blake's crews must have heard the welcome cry of 
' sand and shells ' from the man at the lead, which told 
them that they were again in Channel soundings, in the 
beginning of February 1651. He had been one year 
absent, and had been cruising continuously. In itself 
this was a considerable feat in the seventeenth century, 
when the hardiest seamen thought it almost impossible 
to keep the sea with a squadron of large ships in winter. 
His efforts to carry out his orders had not been wholly 
successful, for Rupert was still at large, though in a 
crippled condition, but he had, none the less, done much. 
Portugal had been compelled to seek peace on terms 
advantageous to England. Spain was shut to the 
Royalists, and France had been punished for her sea- 
men's over-haste in profiting by the supposed naval 
weakness of the English. More important even than 
his services in actual conflict had been Blake's success 
in organising a thoroughly efficient squadron, and win- 
ning for himself, and through him for his Government, 
the loyal devotion of the seamen. Before the year was 
out, the Commonwealth had an opportunity of showing 
how thoroughly it trusted his influence over the men 



In the Channel, and at Whitehall 6$ 

who manned the fleet. Parliament was not backward 
in acknowledging its debt. On February 13, ' upon a 
relation made by General Blake of the safe arrival of that 
part of the Parliament fleet which is under his command, 
and of the wonderful appearance of the powerful hand 
of God with him in his services at sea,' he was voted 
the thanks of the House for his great and faithful ser- 
vice, and duly thanked by Mr. Speaker. At the same 
time, and according to an admirable custom, he was 
voted a substantial testimony of gratitude in the form 
of 1,000/., and the Council of State was ordered to see 
to the present payment of this sum. Present payment 
seems to have been more difiicult than voting, for exactly 
one month later the Admiralty Committee was inquiring 
^ where the 1,000/. ordered by Parliament to Colonel 
Blake may be had,' but as a warrant was duly issued 
by the Commissioners of Prizes, the reward was doubt- 
less finally paid. 

Votes of thanks, or even of a thousand pounds, are 
less trustworthy signs of confidence than immediate 
reappointment to an important command. Blake had 
the third, as well as the two first. On March 15 he 
was selected to take charge of the fleet for the Irish 
Seas and the Isle of Man. The names of the ships told 
off to form his command are not without interest in 
themselves. They were the ' Phoenix,' ' Providence, 
' Fox,' ' Tenth Whelp,' ' Mayflower,' ' Hind,' ' Truelove/ 
' Convertine,' ' Little President,' ' Constant Warwick,' 
' Convert,' and the galliot ' Hoy.' For special service 
on the Irish coast were the ' Portsmouth,' ' Swiftsure,' 
' Concord,' ' Fellowship,' and ' Hector.' Names of ships 
are curiously permanent in the English navy. We have 

F 



66 Robert Blake 

still a ' Swiftsure ' and a ' Hector,' descended through a 
long line of fighting craft from those and earlier days. 
It is interesting, too, to find a ' Mayflower ' in Blake's 
squadron. Was she the Argo of New England (ships 
were long-lived then), or another merchant ship of the 
same name pressed for the fleet. We have seen a ' Con- 
vertine ' in Rupert's squadron. Probably this was the 
same retaken. There was a ' Fox ' in Nelson's squadron 
at Tenerife. He heard the cries of her crew as she 
sunk, riddled by the fire of the Spanish batteries, while 
he was being carried back to the ' Theseus ' in his galley, 
desperately wounded, and stopped, regardless of his 
own sufferings, to pick up the drowning men. The 
'Tenth Whelp' was one of ten sister ships built by 
Charles I., and christened first, second, third, &c. The 
' Constant Warwick ' ought, if the naval historian knew 
what he was about, to have a history to herself. She 
was the first English frigate. Originally built as a 
private war-ship by the puritanical and piratical Earl of 
Warwick, she was bought by Charles, and took a con- 
spicuous part in the services of the English fleet till 
far into the reign of Charles II., when Mr. Pepys had 
to point out how she had been reduced from a prime 
sailer to a slug by overgunning. 

Blake's flag had not been flying for a fortnight when 
he was at sea again in hot haste, to do important 
service and avert a great danger. On A|)ril 1, orders 
were hurrying to him from the Council of State to finish 
the business he knew of before he went hence. This 
was the reduction of the Scilly Isles, still held by Sir 
• John Greenvil for the King. The sudden urgency of 
the Council was due to the receipt of information that 



In the Channel, and at Whitehall 6y 

Tromp was on his way to the same waters, and their 
orders contain a warning of the great storm which was 
to burst in the Channel a year later. Sir John and his 
Royalist followers had begun to drop into something 
very like piracy. They had been capturing Dutch 
vessels as well as English. The States were not likely 
to tolerate this sort of thing, and therefore Tromp was 
sent with a squadron to bring Greenvil to his senses, 
and perhaps to seize Scilly. So most Englishmen 
believed at least, and certainly the possession of a 
fortified post at the mouth of the Channel would be of 
infinite use to Holland. Now the Council of State had 
need to see that no such thing happened, and so Blake 
was hurried off", and Ascue was commanded to join 
him. The orders of the Council were as usual master- 
pieces of decision and clearness of statement. Blake 
was to push on the business of Scilly, and if Tromp 
interferes, ' you are,' they say, ' to require him to desist, 
and if he persists, to use the best ways and means you 
can to enforce him, and in all things to preserve the 
honour and interest of this nation.' In less official 
language, Blake was to blow the Dutchmen out of the 
water if they came too near Scilly, but as the Council 
did not wish for a war with Holland, he was to give 
Tromp full leave to take satisfaction on Sir John 
Greenvil, provided he could do so without prejudice to 
the Commonwealth. If he caught the Royalists at sea 
he might make them walk the plank, but he must not 
hang them on shore in Scilly. 

Tromp, finding he had not to do with the Govern- 
ment which had tamely allowed him to attack Orquendo's 

leons under the very guns of Dover twelve years 

F 2 



68 Robert Blake 

before, kept at a respectful distance. Blake, Ascue, 
and a military officer, Colonel Clarke, wko had been 
detached for the service by Desborow, spent April and 
part of May in subduing Sir John Greenvil. On the 
24th of the latter month the Eoyalist officer surrendered, 
and that danger was averted. 

Besides covering Colonel Clarke's attack on the forts 
at St. Mary and St. Agnes, Blake had it in charge to 
stop any succour the Earl of Derby's vessels in the Isle 
of Man might attempt to send to the ' King of Scotland.' 
By the beginning of August this had become a very 
pressing question indeed. In the last days of July 
Charles Stuart, finding his position at Stirling had been 
rendered untenable by Cromwell's flank march through 
Fife, suddenly broke up his camp and marched rapidly 
south. On August 6 he crossed the Border, and then a 
stirring month began for the Council of State. Among 
the innumerable orders they poured forth all over 
England during the Eoyalist march to Worcester, there 
could not but be several addressed to Blake. One of 
these contained perhaps the very last instructions which 
would be expected by a modern admiral. On August 9 
he was informed that a commission had been issued, 
giving him command of all the troops in Cornwall, 
Devon, Somerset, and Dorset, during the absence of 
Major-General Desborow. To Blake and his contem- 
poraries the choice of a commander to keep the Koyalists 
in check while the bulk of the Parliamentary garrison 
was drawn off for service in the field can have caused 
no surprise whatever. The interchange of sea and land 
commands was common enough, and nobody could be 
fitter for the post than an officer who had seen service 



In the Channel, and at Whitehall 6g 

all over tlie West. As a matter of fact the commission 
never took effect. Tlie death of Popham deprived the 
Parliament of a trusted officer to watch the Downs, and 
Blake was immediately chosen to fill his place. Three 
days after being appointed to command on shore, he 
received instructions to take over the fleet, ' to keep 
those affairs in good order, and prevent any impression 
that may be made on the seamen by misrepresentation 
of affairs.' He was, in his own phrase, used at another 
crisis, to ' keep foreigners from fooling us.' The Council 
of State were afraid that efforts might be made to help 
the Royalists from abroad, and doubtless much more 
disturbed by thoughts of the possible consequences of 
another mutiny. Blake hoisted his flag in the ' Victory,' 
and took his station in the Downs. Here he remained 
on the look-out for foreigners seeking to fool us, and 
Royalist agents trying to stir up a mutiny. Neither 
one nor the other appeared. The crowning mercy of 
September 3 gave the Royalist party its death-wound, 
and a few weeks later the ' Victory ' was put out of 
commission. 

One last piece of service Blake had to do against 
his own countrymen. Within a few months he would 
be fighting for England and against the foreigner, and 
gaining the admiration of Royalist and Roundhead alike, 
but in the meantime there was one more blow to be 
struck in the Civil War. Sir George Carteret held 
Jersey for the King, and there was, as there had been 
in the case of Scilly, a danger of Dutch intervention. 
An expedition was despatched in October to capture 
this last Royalist hold. Blake was in command of the 
squadron, and Colonel Hayne led the troops. They had 



70 Robert Blake 

no easy task before them. Carteret had some 4,000 
men in the island, and his forts were capable of defence, 
but hard as it might be to beat him, it was harder to 
get at him. Landing troops in the face of an active 
enemy is always a risky operation, and when it has to 
be performed on a rocky coast during a stormy autumn, 
it is very likely to end in disaster. The New Model 
was capable of this, and even greater things. When 
Blake reached the coasts of Jersey he found the weather 
too bad to allow of any attempt at landing for days. 
At last, when the horses of the expedition seemed on 
the point of being utterly destroyed by starvation and 
rough usage, it was decided to make a push for the 
shore. The storm had moderated sufficiently to allow 
of the boats being lowered. They were soon filled with 
men, and were driven on the beach. It was nearly mid- 
night. The Royalists, who must have seen the squadron 
hanging off the coast all day, were on the alert, and 
their horse fell fiercely on the Parliamentary soldiers as 
they leapt from the boats. The men were mostly up to 
their necks in water, and in the darkness and confusion 
were at a great disadvantage, but they belonged to a 
force which ' truly was never beaten at all,' and they 
fought their way on. After half an hour of sharp 
struggle the Royalist horse broke and fled. 

Sir George Carteret was convinced by this defeat of 
his inability to keep the open field, and retired at once 
into Elizabeth Castle. The minor forts fell rapidly. 
Mount Orgueil surrendered to Hayne, and Blake took 
up a position outside St. Aubyn Bay, to block the 
governor up in his fortress. If Sir George had been 
really minded to escape, the Parliamentary Admiral 



In the Channel, and at Whitehall 71 

might lia,ve watcliecl in vain. Elizabeth Castle stands 
among the shallows and reefs of the Jersey coast ; boat- 
men accustomed to sail among them from their youth 
upwards could easily have carried the garrison over to 
the coast of France by detachments under cover of night. 
Lady Carteret and some thirty civilians did escape in 
this very way. Her husband might have blown the castle 
up, and have got off himself after holding out for months, 
but he had good reason, in the shape of an estate, not 
to push things to an extremity. The Royalist cause 
would not have been benefited by his private ruin, and 
he had done enough for honour. At the end of 1651 
he surrendered on good terms, and there ended the fight 
for or against the Stuarts, as far as Blake was con- 
cerned. 

After two years of nearly incessant cruising he had 
rest — the kind of rest which takes the form of a change 
of work — for a very few weeks. In the interval between 
subduing Jersey and hoisting his flag again in the Downs 
to meet Tromp in February 1652, he must have been 
back in London, in his place in Parliament. His name 
appears in the list of the Ordnance and Admiralty Com- 
mittees in December, but this is no proof of his return 
from sea. In January, however, he was appointed with 
others to hear the ambassador of the Dukes of Tuscany 
and Oldenburg ' in the matted Guard Chamber,' and 
his name was added, with Mr. Martin's, to the general 
Committee of Foreign Affairs. These were duties to 
be attended to directly, and in person. The business of 
the Duke of Tuscany, which fills a good few pages of 
the Calendar of State Papers about this time, came to 
be put straight by Blake in a quite unparliamentary 



72 Robert Blake 

way later on. Ferdinand de' Medici had quarrels with 
the Levant Company, or they with him, and moreover 
he had his share in the great Rupert question. One 
day a final settlement was to be made at Leghorn ; 
for the present Blake heard the ambassadors, and then 
had to see to the arrangement of a nearer and more 
pressing matter. His command of the fleet was renewed 
for nine months on February 25, and in the early days 
of the next month the Commonwealth was pointing out 
to him the extraordinary occasion there was for getting 
a fleet to sea at once, and he was visiting the Thames 
dockyards with a general commission to suspend indo- 
lent or incompetent ofiicials, and press on the work. 
He was preparing for the Dutch war. 

Blake had now reached the end of the second stage 
in his career. The defence of Taunton had marked 
him out as an able and trustworthy officer. There had 
been enough in his services during the three arduous 
years between February of 1649 and February of 1652 
to show that he possessed the qualities required in a 
master of the great art of war. He had won no striking 
victory, and had even then been partially unsuccessful in 
some of his operations, but he had in the main been 
victorious. Eupert was still at large, but he was lurk- 
ing with a diminishing force on the coasts of Africa. 
The Portuguese and French had been smartly chastised, 
the Royalist garrisons had been swept from the Channel, 
and what was more important than any of these things, 
the fleet had been thoroughly reorganised, and attached 
to the new Government. To say that it had been 
gained to the service of the Rump would be an inaccurate 
way of stating the case, but it was prepared to serve the 
rulers of England for the time being, and to think tha 



In the Channel, and at Whitehall 73 

its first duty was to keep foreigners from interfering in 
our concerns. 

From the end of 1651 there is a distinct change in 
Blake's position. During his earlier sea services, he 
was simply the colleague of Popham and Deane. The 
Parliament seems to have considered Popham the most 
important of its three admirals and generals at sea. 
After his death Blake, who had now a long list of 
services to show, became incontestably the leading man 
in maritime affairs, and one of the foremost Englishmen 
of his time. He was joined in command with others 
during the ensuing war, but it was always with a certain 
superiority, not indicated by any higher nominal rank, 
but by the deference shown to his opinion. The almost 
absolute power given him over the dockyards shows 
what profound confidence was felt in his administrative 
faculty. In the following May he received another 
proof of the trust felt in him by the Council of State. 
Blank commissions were sent to him in the Downs, to 
be filled up with the names of the ofiicers he preferred 
to have under him as vice and rear admirals. He was 
to fill them after conferring with the Lord General and 
Mr. Bond, who were also engaged in urging on the 
naval preparations against the Dutch, but it is obvious 
that a large discretion was left in his hands. 

There is one question about Blake which is not 
without interest, and which may be as conveniently asked 
here as elsewhere. Was he, whose name is associated 
with Nelson's in the mind of all Englishmen, ever in the 
proper sense of the word a seaman ? It seems impos- 
sible that a country gentleman, and colonel of horse or 
foot, who never went to sea until he was fifty, can ever 
have attained to more than a superficial knowledge of 



74 Robert Blake 

an art only to be mastered by mucli and early practice. 
'- Sailorman ' in the way Anson, Hawke, or Oollingwood 
were sailormen, lie never can bave been. He never 
went aloft, or kept a watcli, or laid a ship's course, or 
commanded a boat in his life. On the other hand, it 
is hard to believe that the man who met Tromp on 
equal terms was deficient in the knowledge required to 
handle a fleet. The truth probably is, that he had ac- 
quired in the course of his cruisings on the coast of 
Ireland and Portugal very much that knowledge of 
sea affairs which is often acquired by a clever admiralty 
lawyer who is also a yachtsman. It would not have 
sufficed to enable him to take a trading brig from Hull 
to Leghorn, but it was enough to enable him to com- 
mand a fleet. As Admiral he had a large staff of officers 
to carry out his orders. Penn, Lawson, and many 
others who served him were seamen, and to them he 
left the execution of the movements he might think 
necessary. He knew what ought to be done, and had 
seamanship enough to see that his subordinates did it. 
That he had the moral and intellectual qualities which 
have more to do with making a great commander than 
technical knowledge — a fact much overlooked by profes- 
sional men — is beyond question. If Lord John Kussell 
had indeed taken command of the Channel fleet, it is pos- 
sible that he might, with the help of a good flag captain, 
have extricated himself from the difficulties of the posi- 
tion with unexpected credit. With what knowledge he 
had acquired in a short period of his middle life, and 
a firm conviction that ' Expedition was the soul of all 
military affairs,' Blake did succeed in defeating the 
most famous admiral and the most practised fleet then 
existing in Europe. 



75 



CHAPTER VI. 

WAR WITH HOLLAND. 

The quarrel between England and the States liad been 
ripening for years before it finally exploded in open 
war. From early in tlie reign of James I. a number of 
irritating questions had been in debate between the two 
countries. There were diplomatic causes of dispute in 
abundance which might have led to an open rupture if 
James had been less a lover of peace, or Charles had 
not been so weak. These political matters had, how- 
ever, done less to anger Englishmen than a variety of 
commercial and maritime quarrels. In the seventeenth 
century the Dutch were in a condition of advancing, 
and, as Englishmen felt, offensive prosperity. Their 
carrying trade was flourishing in a way which seemed 
monstrous to a people who held it the first duty of a 
Government to protect native industry. Their busses 
fished openly in English waters, and refused obstinately 
to pay the tax of the tenth herring claimed by the 
King. Whole fleets of these craft took up their station 
in English waters under protection of an armed convoy. 
In the East Indies the Dutch and English, after banding 
together to oust the Portuguese, had come to blows 
over their booty. The Dutch East India Company had 



y6 Robert Blake 

driven tlie EnglisL. from tlie Spice Islands. We liad 
not yet found that they had thereby done us the service 
of compelling us to turn to the coasts of Malabar and 
Coromandel, and lay the foundations of our Eastern 
Empire. In 1650 the loss was fresh, and men did not 
forget that the massacre of Amboyna and the lonely 
death of Nathaniel Courthope in Puleroon were still 
unavenged. To no small extent the .Dutch had taken 
the place of the Spaniards as the object of the English 
sailor's hatred. The open partiality of the Orange party 
for the Royalists had added another grievancOj while in 
1651 the fears of some enterprise against the Channel 
Islands had strengthened the already existing causes of 
quarrel. 

The Parliament had, as soon as it was at leisure to 
attend to domestic affairs, taken measures to correct the 
real or supposed grievances of the trading community 
by passing the famous Navigation Act.^ While the 
anger of Holland at this sharp blow was still blazing, 
the Parliament had made proposals to the States for a 
union between the Commonwealths. This request for 
a resignation of national life was refused in the natural 
course of things. The murder of Dr. Dorislaus by 
Royalist refugees at the Hague, and the cold reception 
given to Oliver St. John, the Commonwealth's envoy, 
had added to other causes of irritation till, by the 
beginning of 1652, both countries were in a thoroughly 
pugnacious frame of mind, and only an accident was 

* The Navigation Act, first passed by the Long Parliament and 
re-enacted after the Restoration, forbade the importation of goods 
into England except in English vessels, or the vessels of the 
country producing them. It was aimed at the carrying trade of the 
Dutch. 



Waj? with Holland 77 

required to bring on a war. It is in the last degree un- 
likely, with all these stimulants spiriting the two peoples 
on to fight, that peace could have been permanently 
maintained ; but the collision was hurried on by the 
Governments. Both were equally active in asserting 
their wish for a firm alliance, and in pushing on their 
naval armaments. The States had Tromp at sea with 
a strong squadron, and the Parliament was straining 
every nerve to strengthen the fleet under Blake in the 
Downs. 

There was one subject of dispute which under these 
circumstances might have been calculated to set the 
guns of the rival admirals firing of their own mere 
motion. The kings of England had for long — it may 
almost be said from the earliest times — claimed a species 
of sovereignty over the narrow seas. Their officers had 
always been under orders to insist on a salute from 
foreign ships as a recognition of this right. This mark 
of respect had been insisted on and received even by 
single cruisers from strong squadrons carrying the am- 
bassadors of powerful States, and even sometimes the 
sovereign himself. The act of submission was not 
always willingly made, and many cases might be cited in 
which English admirals had fired on foreign flags during 
peace because the stranger's topsails were not lowered 
jDromptly enough. In ordinary times these splutterings 
of battle lead to no serious consequences. Fighting on 
blue water was too common for any or for no reason at 
all to excite much national feeling, and the salute was 
at least an acknowledged usage ; but when there was a 
general inclination to fight, this question of the salute 
was eminently fitted to afibrd a pretext for war. So it 



78 Robert Blake 

proved in 1652. From the beginning of that year 
English captains had been more than usually peremptory 
in asserting their superiority, and broadsides had been 
exchanged in the Channel. At last the thing was 
brought to a crisis by Blake and Tromp themselves. 

In the early days of May, the Dutch admiral was 
cruising with a fleet of some forty sail between Nieuport 
and the mouth of the Meuse, with general orders to 
protect his country's commerce and watch the English 
fleet. Blake was lying in Dover Koads with fifteen sail, 
while eight others were at anchor under Bourne in the 
Downs. Stories of encounters in the Channel and of 
the difiiculties of Dutch merchantmen watched by 
English war- ships would naturally be brought to Tromp 
by his cruisers. He was not the man to hear them 
tamely. Tromp had a bitter personal quarrel of his 
own with the English. He had to revenge his father's 
death in battle with an English pirate, and his own 
long slavery to his father's slayer. As a member of the 
Orange party, and therefore a friend of the Stuarts, he 
had a double reason for hating the fleet of the Common- 
wealth. Now, with a long career of victory to give him 
confidence, conscious of the devotion of the Dutch 
seamen, knowing that the two Governments were 
daily coming nearer to open war, and that he would 
be supported by the national pride of Holland, he must 
have entered the Straits with a predisposition to come 
to blows. Some civilities seem to have passed between 
him and Bourne in the .Downs, which Tromp had 
entered under stress of weather. In this case the 
Dutch admiral would have no scruple in saluting an 
ofiicer who was at anchor in his own waters. On 



WAie WITH Holland 79 

May 19 Tromp stood over towards Calais witli a north- 
easterly wind. On his way lie was met by a Captain 
Van Saanen of Amsterdam, who brought news of a 
brush between single ships off the Start, and of the 
difficulties of some Dutch merchantmen blockaded in 
the Channel. He took his decision at once. The 
Dutch fleet, which had been standing to the eastward 
close-hauled, was put before the wind, and with Tromp 
himself at the head in his flagship, the ' Brederode,' it 
bore down on Dover Roads, the scene of his own auda- 
cious attack on Orquendo. 

The meeting with Van Saanen and the change 
of course were both clearly seen from the decks of 
Blake's ships, which were under weigh, standing across 
the Straits in a course parallel to that first held by the 
Dutch fleet. To the English Admiral and captains 
there could be no mystery in what had happened. 
Tromp had received orders from Holland to attack 
them, and was bearing down for the purpose. In their 
accounts of what followed, each admiral accused the 
other of being the aggressor, and both were doubtless 
quite sincere in their belief. It is never easy to say 
whether the fire commits an aggression on the gun- 
powder or the gunpowder on the fire. As the fleets 
neared in that May afternoon, they had begun war in 
their hearts, and the actual fighting was a spontaneous 
act. Guns were fired from both flagships — Blake's 
flag was flying in the ^ James ' — as they approached, 
which were said to be signals by one side, and received 
as insults by the other. Then crash came the ' Brede- 
rode's ' broadside into the English ship. 

A foolish story tells how Blake was sitting in his 



8o Robert Blake 

cabin — like the Spanish gentleman with the impossible 
name in ' Westward Ho/ and ' his officers were sitting 
round him, with their swords upon the table, at the 
wine ' when Tromp's guns shattered the stern windows 
of the ' James.' So dull an imagination had the inventor 
of this tale, that he can find no other words for Blake's 
mouth than the feeble jest, ' Tromp is ill bred to take 
my house for a brothel and break my windows.' The 
author of this ' grobe Seemannswiiz^ which has had a most 
undeserved popularity, put his hero in a very unlikely 
place, and among very improbable surroundings. Long 
before the Dutch bullets came crashing into the ' James's ' 
timbers, Blake must have been on the high poop of his 
flagship, watching every movement of the ' Brederode,' 
as she came down on his line before the north-easterly . 
gale. His men were at quarters, with their guns cast 
loose and their linstocks burning. Tromp's challenge 
was taken up at once. The batteries of the ' James ' 
opened fire. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon, 
and the battle lasted fiercely for five hours. For some 
considerable time the brunt of it fell on the ' James ' 
alone. Blake — like Collingwood on the great day which 
ended the struggle for the sovereignty of the seas then 
beginning — had outsailed his squadron. He met the 
head of the Dutch line alone. In a few moments he 
was surrounded by enemies. Tromp's supporters were 
running before the wind and could join him, before the 
close-hauled ships of the English line could come to the 
support of their Admiral. The fight was less unequal 
than a mere statement of the numbers engaged would 
seem to make it. The English ships of the day were 
more solidly built than the Dutch, and the gunnery of 



WAjR with Holland 8i 

the Englisli sailors was already famous for its rapidity 
and precision. Still the ' James ' suffered heavily ; her 
master was killed, and some fifty of her men fell dead 
or disabled. Before dark her mainmast had gone over 
her side, and she had been struck in hull or rigging by 
numbers of bullets. Meanwhile, the rest of the squadron 
had come into the line of battle, and at some time be- 
fore nine o'clock relief reached the overmatched English 
squadron. The thunder of the guns was heard even if 
the fight was not seen by Bourne in the Downs, and he 
weighed at once. While Tromp and Blake were laying 
yardarm to yardarm he fell on the rear of the Dutch line, 
cutting off two of their ships, and created a diversion. 
Soon afterwards the Dutch gave up the attempt to force 
the Straits, hauled to the wind and stood over to the 
Elemish coast in the dark, leaving the two prizes in the 
hands of the English seamen. During the following 
day the fleets were in sight of one another, but the 
action was not renewed. The English made their way 
into Dover, towing their dismasted flagship, and Tromp 
returned to the Texel. Before going he recovered one 
of the two lost ships, which had been deserted by her 
captor Lawson, as too much battered to be worth 
carrying into port. 

The Admirals hastened to justify what they had 
done to their respective Governments. It was no small 
thing. The fight off Dover was the beginning of the 
most obstinate struggle in the whole history of naval 
warfare. AVhen the news of what was believed to be 
Tromp'3 unprovoked attack reached London, there was 
an immediate and noisy demonstration in favour of war 
with Holland. The mob was so violent that the Council 

a 



82 Robert Blake 

thought it necessary to send a guard to protect the 
house occupied by the Dutch ambassadors. The States, 
though they would greatly have preferred to avoid a 
rupture, were not prepared to submit to the exorbitant 
demands of the Rump, and after another effort at nego- 
tiations, entered with spirit into the war, which, what- 
ever the earlier provocations given to England may have 
been, was in this case forced upon them. 

No two adversaries ever met in the history of naval 
war more fairly matched than the fleets of England and 
Holland. The whale and herring fisheries, the carrying 
trade, their great commerce with the East and with 
the Levant, had given the Dutch an undoubted supe- 
riority in material resources over any possible rival. 
Their shipping was calculated to be equal to that of all 
the other states of Europe put together. Their seafaring 
population, very large in itself, was reinforced by sailors 
of the hardy nations of the North, who found good 
work and wages in the ports of Holland and Zeeland. 
During the long war with Spain, their fleets had been 
in constant employment. Their admirals were the only 
sea commanders who can be said to rank with the 
English admirals, and some of them, notably Tromp 
and De Ruyter, were fully the equals of any of our own 
heroes. In mere number of ships, not by any means 
the most important factor of naval strength, the States 
had immense resources. During this war, which barely 
lasted twenty months, no less than sixty fighting vessels, 
many of them very large, were launched in the Dutch 
yards — a number at least sufiicient to replace their total 
loss by shipwreck or capture. On the other hand, the 
Netherlands suffered from several weaknesses. They 



Waj? with Holland 83 

were so dependent upon trade that as soon as it became 
impossible to continue the fisheries, and difficult to 
bring home the convoys from the East or the Levant, 
surrender on any tolerable terms became a necessity. 
Dutchmen could put their country under water to 
escape foreign conquest, but were not prepared to be 
ruined for a point of honour. After all, the lady who 
did not fear death, but who could not stand pinching, 
was not a wholly absurd person. The strength of their 
navy, too, lay rather in its quantity than its quality. 
Hitherto they had only had to fight the clumsy and ill- 
managed Spanish galleons. The States had conse- 
quently been tempted to build their vessels slightly, 
and of inferior timber. In order that they might 
navigate the shallows of the Dutch coast, they were 
constructed with very flat bottoms. They were there- 
fore ill-fitted to cope with severe gunnery, and were 
not nearly so weatherly as the English ships. Obstinate 
courage and good seamanship might have triumphed over 
these defects, but there was a terrible source of weakness 
in the very heart of the Dutch fleet. The officers were 
divided by political quarrels. Each of the Dutch factions 
— the Orange and the Republican, had its supporters 
among the naval officers. In the desperate battles of 
the next twenty months, it happened too often for the 
honour of Holland, but, as we may confess without 
shame, happily for the fortune of England, that an 
admiral of one party was badly supported, or shamefully 
deserted, by officers of the other. 

The naval power of the Commonwealth and of the 
Protectorate, which came into being in the middle of 
the war, was smaller tlian the Dutch, but it was 

G 2 



84 Robert Blake 

thorouglily sound. Charles had left some sixty ships, 
mostly built by the Petts, and the Admiralty Committee 
had been launching others in batches of eight or ten, 
for the. last three years. England was not liable to 
find its trade spoilt because one route was blocked. It 
was moreover still mainly an agricultural country, and 
therefore better able to bear interruption to its com- 
merce. The political divisions of Englishmen, bitter as 
they were, did not extend to the fleet. Cases of mis- 
conduct did occur, but they were attributable to indi- 
vidual failings, to cowardice or stupidity, and with 
these the Government dealt in a very summary way. 
It must not be forgotten that the line of battle was always 
partly composed of merchant ships hired or pressed for 
the war. In not a few cases they were left in command 
of their skippers, who might have neither the will nor 
the ability to fight them properly. These men were 
often part or whole owners of the ships, and they shrank 
from thrusting all the property they had in the world 
under Tromp's guns. It was soon found that vessels 
handled in this fashion were a mere hindrance in the 
line, and the Commonwealth, largely on Blake's recom- 
mendation, made it a rule to employ their own ofiicers 
only. If there were any among them who needed a 
stimulus in the discharge of their duty, it was supplied 
by the knowledge that they had to choose between 
the risk of being shot by ^the Dutch, and certainty of 
being shot for cowardice at home if they flinched. 
With these forces, in which experience, numbers, 
and quality were so fairly balanced, the greatest 
naval power of the day and the greatest naval power 
of the future came out in the summer of 1652 to 



Wai^ with Holland 85 

measure their forces in the wide lists of the North 
Sea. 

The length of time which passed before the main 
fleets of the two countries were ready for action is a 
clear proof that the war had come upon their Govern- 
ments as a surprise. Of the two, the English was the 
better prepared. Over and above the ships fitting in 
the Thames, they had the fleet of Sir George Ascue 
who had just returned from the West Indies, whither 
he had gone to take possession of the colonies in the 
name of the Parliament. He joined Blake in the 
Downs, and the two at once devoted themselves to 
the pleasant and lucrative work of snapping up Dutch 
convoys. All the advantages were on the side of 
England in this game. The Dutch were coming home 
in ignorance of the fact that war had broken out, and 
were, as a matter of course, taking the ordinary route 
along the Channel, which led them right past the 
English coast into the hands of the fleet in the Downs 
— even if they had the luck to get so far. In the 
course of June, therefore, the Londoners had frequently 
the pleasure of hearing that this or the other handful 
of Dutch merchant ships, all more or less richly laden, 
had been captured by Admiral Blake or Admiral 
Ascue, and sent into the Thames. That magic word 
prize-money was ringing in the ears of all Wapping, 
and sailors came cheerfully in to man the ships. 

In the last days of June Blake sailed north with ' a 
gallant fleet ' to sweep the Dutch fishermen off* the 
coasts of England and Scotland. This was useful and 
necessary work, for the poaching of the Hollanders had 
been one of the grievances which brought on the war, 



iS6 Robert Blake 

but it could not be glorious. Witli a fleet of at least 
forty sail under his command, the English Admiral 
could have no difficulty in overpowering the fifteen 
frigates of the Dutch convoy. He did what he had to 
do thoroughly. The coast was swept to the extreme 
north of Scotland, the enemy's guard-ships were taken 
or sunk, the cargoes of poached herrings were thrown 
into the sea, and the busses were sent empty home. 
While the bulk of the English fleet was engaged in 
this fashion, the Council of State was learning a lesson 
as to the folly of dividing its forces in the presence of 
the enemy. Barely had Blake passed Dunbar when 
Tromp swept out of the Texel and appeared in the 
Straits with upwards of a hundred sail. There was no 
force to meet him except Sir George Ascue's squadron 
of fourteen ships in the Downs, and the vessels fitting 
for sea in the Thames. These last were not ready to 
sail, and even if they had been, could not have left the 
river without manifest danger of being overpowered in 
the midst of the Dutch fleet. Ascue took the only 
course open to him. He ran under the guns of Dover 
Castle, and anchored his ships as close as possible to 
the shore. For a time there seemed danger of an 
actual invasion, or at least of some attack on Ascue by 
Tromp, who knew those waters well. Though the 
Council of State had made a mistake, it did not lose 
its head. There was no panic. Letters were sent to 
Blake telling him of the state of things, and leaving it 
to him to return or stay where he was, as he thought 
best. Frigates were stationed off the Lizard to warn 
home-coming merchant ships to put into the western 
ports till the danger was past. Cromwell went down 



Waj? with Holland 87 

to Dover to superintend tlie erection of batteries ; tlie 
inland garrisons were hurried down to tlie coast, and 
tlie militia called out. These measures would probably 
have been enougli to make any attack of Tromp's a 
failure, but none was ever made. The fortune of 
England, which, has saved her from the consequences of 
so much blundering, was true on this occasion also. 
Tromp's fleet was kept idle by calms for days, and 
when the wind did come it was from the south-west. 
Finding there was nothing to be done at Dover, the 
Dutch Admiral sailed north, partly with the object of 
meeting Blake, but also to find and protect a squadron 
of richly laden East Indiamen which were returning to 
Holland by that route. 

If the fleets had met there would have been an 
earlier version of the battle ofl" the Ness, but Tromp 
had lost his luck. He met the Indiamen between the 
Orkneys and Norway, but before he could find the 
English ships a series of terrible gales scattered his 
fleet, and he was driven back to the Texel with about 
half his force. The other half was either lost or driven 
into the ports of Norway. For a time it was believed in 
England that all these ships had gone to the bottom, 
but as a matter of fact the greater part of them got 
back to Holland before long. They did not come home 
to be under the command of Tromp. The year had 
been disastrous to Holland. Thousands of families 
had suffered loss or even ruin by the scattering of the 
herring fleet. With its usual injustice the mob laid the 
blame for this misfortune, and others of the same kind 
which had happened to the convoys, on Tromp. They 
thought he might have prevented at least the capture of 



88 Robert Blake 

the busses by sailing at once to the north instead of 
wasting time (as they would call it) in threatening 
Ascue. In high dudgeon at the ingratitude of his 
countrymen, and perhaps with a self-reproachful sense 
of the spice of truth there was in the charge, Tromp 
resigned his commission. The States, who were, with 
all the meanness of party politicians, not sorry to part 
with an officer of known Orange opinions, accepted his 
resignation. De Witt and De Ruyter, la monnaie de M. 
Turenne, were appointed his successors. 

Before they had an opportunity of showing whether 
they could fill his place, there was a little bit of fighting 
done in the Channel altogether outside of the great war. 
Scores were not yet settled with the French, and just 
at that moment the Parliament saw a chance of teaching 
them an effective lesson. Dunkirk was besieged by the 
Spaniards, and Cardinal Mazarin was sending a squad- 
ron to relieve it under the Dukeof Vendome. He never 
reached that port. Blake was back from the north by 
this time with prizes taken from the scattered fleet of 
Tromp. In Calais Roads he fell upon the eight ships of 
Vendome's squadron, and made exceedingly short work 
of them. A more remarkable instance of the high- 
handed proceedings of the Rump's Council of State 
was never given. England was neither in alliance with 
Spain nor at war with France, but it acted as if it were. 
The French had chosen to permit insults to English 
trade, and they were made to suffer. For the rest, the 
lawless state of the sea in those times made these acts of 
reprisal less surprising than they would have appeared 
even fifty years later. In the following century Blake's 
biographer obviously felt that this affair in Calais Roads 



Wa/^ with Holland 89 

had a look of piracy, and he casts about for excuses. 
Some he felt there must have been, though it is ' no- 
where mentioned what inquiry Admiral Blake made 
into this matter.' It would have been surprising if it 
were. In 1652 the thing needed no excuse. The 
French had made no inquiry when they plundered the 
ships of the Smyrna Company, nor did Blake when 
he fell on Yendome. He had his orders, and acted on 
them. 

With the exception of this episode Blake was 
engaged during August and September in cruising off 
the coast of Holland and watching the Straits of Dover. 
In the former month Sir George Ascue had a sharp fight 
with De Ruyter, who was bringing home a convoy, in 
the Channel. The action was indecisive, and the Dutch 
Admiral seems to have carried by far the greater part, 
if not all, of his merchant ships safe into port, to 
have joined De Witt, and stood to sea at once in search 
of the English fleet. Naval warfare, as Nelson was fond 
of insisting whenever he had missed anybody, is very 
uncertain, and it was perhaps not due to any want of 
vigilance that De Euyter was able to pass Dover and 
reach port unmolested. So little can be learnt about 
Blake's movements for these weeks, too, that we cannot 
even say whether he was in a position to watch the 
Dutch. On August 18 even the Council of State knew 
his whereabouts so badly as to be under the necessity 
of sending messengers in search of him to places so 
widely apart as Southwold, Yarmouth, and Dover. 
Whether by ill-luck, ill-management, or that want of 
frigates which so often drove ISTelson to the verge of 
madness, Blake missed De Euyter, In the early part 



90 Robert Blake 

of September the Dutcli Admiral and Ms colleague 
appeared off the Goodwin vSands, and challenged the 
fleet in the Downs to battle. They had done their best 
for the trade of their country for the year, and were now 
about to try and provide for the next by driving the 
English fleet into port. 

The battle which followed has one feature which 
distinguishes it from most others of this war. It is 
more intelligible than the majority of them. Sea fights 
are never easy to be understood by landsmen, nor even 
by naval officers, if we are to judge by the extraordinary 
discrepancies in the accounts they give of them. If any 
reader cares to test this statement let him read James's 
account of the battle of June 1 (a very good specimen), 
or any narrative of Kodney's great victory over De 
Grasse, and see what idea they leave on his mind. 
Still, in the case of these later victories — sea fight and 
victory meant about the same thing with us for long — 
details are to be got. We know the number of ships 
engaged, their order in the line, the admirals' signals, 
the direction of the wind, and so forth. By attending 
to these, and keeping the points of the compass in mind, 
anyone with the knowledge of sea terms possessed by 
six Englishmen out of ten can, by a little patient worry- 
ing, get at some comprehension of what happened. In 
the descriptions of the naval battles of the seventeenth 
century this indispensable information is hardly ever 
given. The admirals confine themselves to reporting 
that they have met the enemy, and, by the powerful 
working of God, have adequately thrashed him. Nothing 
is less certain than the mere number of ships engaged, 
their order of sailing is never given, and the general 



Waj? with Holland 91 

moveinents of tlie fleet are only indicated in tlie vaguest 
manner. 

There is of course one way in wliicli the difficulty 
can be got over. The biographer or historian may use 
the ' recipe for making an epic poem ' and fill his battle 
picture up with the thunder of cannon, flames, heroic 
valour, spars and corpses floating on the water, and all 
the other appropriate ornaments. He may describe his 
hero as ' riding up ' to the enemy, and tell how he 
watched the whole battle with an eagle eye, in ignorance 
of the notorious fact that when two fleets are well 
engaged no admiral could see more than the ships 
immediately around him. Perhaps, however, we have 
had quite enough of this sort of thing. It is better on 
the whole to say as precisely as you can what was done, 
and when you do not know, to say that also. 

One or two things may be asserted about these 
battles with tolerable certainty. They were not con- 
fused scrambles of ships fighting in no order at all. 
This verdict on them rested mainly on the word of a 
Scotch schoolmaster of the last century who thought he 
had discovered the advantages of ' cutting the line.' 
Mr. Clerk was mistaken. Not perhaps as early as 
Elizabeth's time, but assuredly long before the outbreak 
of the war of 1651, the Dutch and English seamen were 
perfectly well aware of the advantages of fighting in 
order and in line ahead — that is, with the ships one 
after the other, instead of side by side, the old order of 
the galleys which had been adhered to by the chiefs of 
the Spanish Armada. It is no doubt true that this 
order was not very accurately kept, and was even some- 
times neglected. Want of practice in handling fleets, 



92 Robert Blake 

and tlie great number of the ships, account satisfactorily 
enough for some of these mistakes, but where the 
proper order was wholly neglected it was because the 
land officers in command of the fleets were obstinate 
and foolish enough to fly in the face of the unanimous 
opinion of the seamen. Monk, after he had become 
Duke of Albemarle, once ran a round dozen ships on 
the Galloper Sands by persisting in trying to carry a 
large fleet up the Thames in line abreast. Under the 
Commonwealth no officer was sure enough of his position 
to indulge himself in freaks of this kind. Blake has 
never been proved to have been guilty of undervaluing 
the opinion of his professional officers, and it is safe to 
conclude that he did in every case what we have good 
evidence for believing they would have advised him to 
do. When he fought this first pitched battle of the 
war he had with him Penn as vice-admiral, and though 
that officer was rather a poor creature in many ways, he 
was a good seaman. 

The battle of September 28 can be, so to speak, 
reconstructed by whoever will remember that the fleets 
did fight in order, and will read the account of their 
movements published by Whitelocke with a chart. Its 
incidents were almost as much dictated by the form of 
the land as those of any land battle. The scene of 
this and many later engagements with the Dutch was 
in that section of the south-east coast of England which 
stretches from the South Foreland to the mouth of the 
Stour, the boundary of Suffolk and Essex. All along 
this line the land is fringed by sands. The Goodwins 
lie over against the coast of Kent, from Pegwell Bay to 
the South Foreland. Inside of them is the road known 



I 



WAJi WITH Holland 93 

as the Downs. As you sail to the north and north-east 
from this anchorage, you leave a score of dangerous 
shallows on your left. Outside, and following the north- 
easterly bend of the Essex coast, are the Girdler and the 
Long Sand. Inside of them are the Maplins, Burrow, 
Buxey, the Gunfleet, and others. This last stretches 
from the mouth of the Colne, along the coast of Essex. 
Outside of the Long Sand is the Kentish Knock. Even 
in the midst of peace, and when these sands are studded 
with light ships, it is dangerous to navigate the waters 
which lie over and about them. In war time, and 
without warning lights, it was perilous in the last ex- 
treme. 

The danger was, however, less for one combatant 
than for the other. The flat construction of the Dutch 
ships made it easier for them to manoeuvre among 
shallows than it was for the sharper keeled English 
ships. It was therefore probably with a distinct inten- 
tion of profiting by this advantage — for the sake of 
which they sacrificed so much else — that the Dutch 
always tried to fight as near the English coast as they 
could, and in more than one battle, success justified 
the calculation. 

In pursuance of their ordinary policy, the Dutch 
had been cruising between Yarmouth and the east end 
of Kent from at least Sej)tember 14. On the 25th 
they were seen at the back of the Goodwins, that 
is to say between those sands and the coast of France. 
For this and the two succeeding days the weather was 
so bad that the English fleet in the Downs could not 
put to sea. It was calmer on the 28th, and Blake sailed 
to the northward, with the wind at north of west. He 



94 Robert Blake 

could calculate with certainty on finding tlie Dutch in 
that direction, since it was their object to watch the 
mouth of the Thames, and they would in any case be 
careful not to entangle themselves in the Straits or cut 
themselves off from their retreat home by getting into 
the Channel. His fleet consisted of between fifty and 
sixty sail. The ' Resolution ' of sixty guns carried his 
flag, since the ' James ' had been dismasted in the fight 
of May 19. Among the ships under his command was 
■the ' Sovereign,' then esteemed the finest war-vessel 
afloat, and famous eliough to deserve particular mention. 
She had been built by Phineas Pett, the founder of that 
family, and called the ' Sovereign of the Seas.' Accord- 
ing to the custom of the time she was covered with 
carving and gilding, some idea of which may be formed 
by looking at the model still preserved at Greenwich. 
In spite of this magnificence, the ' Sovereign,' like many 
other dandies, was a valiant fighter, and the Dutch — at 
least, so said the English sailors— called her the ' Yellow 
Devil.' She outlived the Commonwealth, was re- 
christened ' Royal,' carried Sir Ralph Delaval's fiag at 
the great battle of La Hogue, and ' at length leaky and 
defective herself with age, she was laid up at Chatham 
in order to be rebuilt,' and was there burnt on November 
27, 1696, after sixty years' good service. 

At about three in the afternoon of this eventful 
September 28, Blake sighted the Dutch fleet. They 
were in line, lying close along the outer side of the 
Kentish Knock, heading as it would seem to the south. 
This position had obviously been assumed with the 
intention of putting the English fleet in a dilemma. 
With the wind from north of west, the Dutch were in 



Waj? with Holland 95 

no danger of going on tlie Sand, and would naturally 
calculate tliat their enemy must either attack them to 
leeward, in which case he would be open to the danger 
of having j&re-ships floated down on him, or if he did try 
to get to windward, would run a serious risk of ground- 
ing on the Knock. When the Dutch were sighted, 
there was a gap in the English line. The ' Resolution,' 
with Penn's flagship the ' Sovereign,' the ' Andrew,' 
and a few others, had outsailed the rest of the fleet. 
One of the captaiLS of this vanguard hailed or signalled 
for leave to engage, but was ordered by Blake to wait 
till the rest of the fleet had come up. For an hour the 
enemies remained in sight of one another, without firing 
a shot, the English ships lying-to or beating to wind- 
ward, and the Dutch keeping quiet to lee of the bank. 
Their inaction seemed so surprising at the time, for 
they could easily have cut the English Admiral ofi" from 
his supports, that it was attributed to dissensions 
between the Dutch Admirals. I am inclined to think 
they were acting on the plan mentioned above. During 
this pause De Witt was seen to shift his flag from his 
first ship, a vessel of forty guns, to an Indiaman of fifty- 
six. 

About four o'clock the English line was complete, 
and Blake bore down on the enemy. He doubtless 
hoisted the signal to engage, but it is not said what it 
was, and there was then no general code. His course 
was directed to windward of the Dutch line, and therefore 
between it and the Kentish Knock. A few single guns 
had already been fired by the Dutch, in bravado accord- 
ing to Whitelocke's correspondent, but probably to find 
the range. The ' Resolution ' passed along the Dutch 



g6 Robert Blake 

line^ wMcli edged to the southwards to avoid her, and 
the following ships all poured in their broadsides as 
they went. Then the mishap hoped for by the Dutch 
happened. The flagships of Blake and Penn. the 
' Sovereign,' the ' Andrew,' and as it seems one or two 
others, got aground on the Knock. This accident may 
appear by no means creditable to the seamanship of 
anybody concerned, but it is possible that the risk was 
run deliberately with the object of keeping the weather- 
gage. The English seamen knew that as they had the 
Sand to windward and not to leeward of them, they 
could get off even if they did touch, and in any case 
the grounding of the leading ships would act as a 
warning to the rest of the line. So it turned out ; the 
vessels which had grounded soon freed themselves, and 
those behind, seeing what had befallen their Admirals, 
put their helms up and ran right down on the Dutch, 
who were now standing to the south. ' We fell back to 
receive them,' says Whitelocke's friend, ' and so staid by 
them till night parted us.' 

This irritatingly vague phrase contains all that is 
known of the rest of the battle. It was fierce, and for 
the Dutch disastrous. The orders to the English fleet 
were to waste no powder at long bowls, but to come to 
close quarters, and they were well obeyed. Even the 
merchantship men-of-war were fought with the utmost 
spirit. Following a practice which, continued to be 
universal among continental seamen till Trafalgar, the 
Dutch fired to dismast. The English, as they have 
done since, fired to hull — to sink or kill. The respective 
efficiency of these systems was seen in the result. On 
our side the loss was slight — one captain and about 



Wjj? with Holland 97 

forty men only were killed, and tliough many ships liad 
their rigging cut to pieces, none were sunk or even 
totally disabled The Dutch lost several ships sent to 
the bottom, and had others cut down to hulks. One 
carrying the flag of a rear-admirial struck to Captain 
Mildmay. It was believed in the English fleet, and not 
without reason, that if the early dusk of a September 
evening had not parted the combatants, the Dutch 
would have been utterly destroyed. 

All night the two fleets remained so close together 
that the lights of the Dutch could be seen from the 
English ships. 

The night comes on, we eager to pursue 

The combat still, and they ashamed to leave, 

Till the last streaks of dying day withdrew, 
And doubtful moonlight did our rage deceive. 

The verse might have been written with greater 
truth of this than of the scrambling four days' battle in 
1666. It was thought that the battle would be renewed 
on the following day, but when morning came the 
Dutch were seen to be six miles off" to the north-east. 
The wind had shifted during the night, and the Dutch 
now held the weathergage. They availed themselves 
of it to avoid fighting. All the attempts of Blake to 
bring them to action were unsuccessful, and on the 
30th the English saw them run into Goree. Finding 
himself dangerously near the shallows of the Dutch 
coast, the English Admiral gave up the chase and 
returned home. 



H 



98 Robert Blake 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE DUEL WITH TROMP. 

The immediate effect of this disaster was the restoration 
of Tromp to the command of the Dutch fleet. His 
successors had manifestly not replaced him. Their 
actual defeat was very much worse than mere failure to 
succeed. If the States, too, intended to continue the 
war at all, they had need to exert themselves. Within 
a few weeks great convoys would be ready to go out, 
and within a few months others would be coming home. 
The task of providing for the safety of both fell on 
Tromp, and he set about it in his usual thoroughgoing 
way. In the course of October he had equip^Ded ninety 
sail, including fire-ships, and in November he saw the 
fishing and northern fleets safe out of the German Ocean, 
and came south to keep the Channel clear for the home- 
coming India and Levant traders. 

The Council of State presented him with a very 
favourable opportunity for paying off his scores with 
Blake. They also had their convoys to look after, and 
had weakened the fleet in the Downs for the service. 
London had to be supplied with coal for the winter, 
and Penn was told off to protect the Tyne colliers. 
Meanwhile a quarrel had arisen with Denmark, and a 



The Duel with Tromp 99 

squadron had been detaclied to bring that country to 
reason, and see to the due arrival of our supplies of 
masts and pitch from Scandinavia. Many of Blake's 
vessels were also in need of repair, and had been docked 
at Chatham under the impression that there would be 
no more sea-fighting so late in the year. When Tromp 
appeared off the Goodwins with his ninety sail on 
November 29 Blake had only forty-two ships with him, 
and only twenty of these had their full complement of 
men on board. The odds were heavy, but Blake had 
confidence enough in himself and his fleet to give battle 
in spite of them. His fleet was one in which an admiral 
might well trust. Before weighing to attack an enemy 
twice as strong, in mere numbers at least, as himself, 
Blake called a council of officers. That a council of 
war never fights is a rule to which the whole history 
of the Parliamentary armies and navies is one long 
exception. Their councils of war always did fight. 
The ofiicers who met in the cabin of the ' Triumph ' on 
November 29 came to their usual decision, and the 
forty-two English ships weighed and stood to sea to 
attack Tromp. It is possible that their crews were 
reinforced by volunteers at the last moment. The 
Deal and Dover fishermen had swarmed ofi" in their 
boats to help Blake during the fight on May 19 
when the odds were three to one against him, and 
they would not hang back when they were only two 
to one. 

The fleets met about noon, November 30, off" Dunge- 
ness and fought till dark, which at that season would be 
soon after five o'clock. In the course of an afternoon of 
furious struggle the English sufiered a defeat, but a defeat 

h2 



100 Robert Blake 

whicli came as near as was possible to being as good as 
a victory. To have fought Tromp one against two for 
five hours, and not to have been utterly destroyed was 
honour enough. If it had been possible to beat him 
at such odds the Dutch would not have been, what they 
undoubtedly were, the bravest and most skilful enemies 
we ever met at sea. The movements of the two fleets 
can, as is commonly the case, only be guessed at. 

There were many valiant things done in this 
battle. Blake's flag was flying in the ' Triumph.' The 
* Resolution ' must have been terribly mauled in the 
battle of September 28, and have returned to port to 
make good the damage done by the Kentish Knock 
and the Dutch cannon. Supported by the ' Victory ' 
and the ' Vanguard,' he was engaged for some time with 
a score of the enemy's ships, and ran no small danger of 
beino' overpowered. At last the three ships were re- 
lieved by others, and shook themselves clear. As Blake 
got away from his immediate assailants, he saw a despe- 
rate struggle going on in another part of the line. Two 
English captains, Akson and Batten, commanding the 
^ Garland ' and the ' Bonaventure,' had resolved to haul 
down Tromp's flag, and manoeuvred to lay their ships, 
neither of them vessels of any great size, alongside him. 
To their glory and misfortune they succeeded. They 
grappled the ' Brederode,' and furiously attempted to 
board. Tromp defended the deck of his flagship as he 
always had done. His secretary was shot dead by his 
side. In a few moments other vessels came to his assist- 
ance, and the crews of the ' Garland ' and ' Bonaventure' 
had to defend themselves. Attacked by the new- 
comers, among whom was Bvertzen, the vice-admiral of 



The Duel with Tromp ioi 

Zeeland, and still fastened by tlieir grappling irons 
to the ' Brederode,' they had to beat off swarms of 
boarders. This fight must have been perfectly visible to 
many of the ships on both sides. None of the vessels 
locked together can have been firing. The Dutch would 
be afraid of damaging one another, and the English 
were too busy with their pikes and cutlasses. An at- 
tempt was made to relieve the two ships by Blake and 
the captains near him, but the Dutch crowded up to 
cover their admiral, and while the English flagship was 
fighting with them, the ' Garland ' and the ' Bonaven- 
ture ' were at last overpowered by Tromp. Akson and 
Batten fought till their crews were cut to pieces. 
The ' Garland's ' upper deck was blown up by her cap- 
tain, and scores of Dutchmen sent into the air with it. 
This desperate resource only averted the end for a short 
time. Tromp urged on his boarders, and at last the two 
vessels were captured. When darkness came Blake 
drew off" his fleet and retreated into the Thames, having 
lost, besides the ' Garland ' and the ' Bonaventure,' three 
ships sunk. 

So ended the battle off the Ness, victoriously for 
Tromp, but not disastrously for Blake. The Dutchman 
hoisted his famous and perhaps legendary broom at 
the mainmast head of his flagship, and sailed in 
triumph along the south coast of England to sweep 
the Channel. In spite of this piece of almost comic 
bravado, Tromp can hardly have been very proud of 
his victory. At the bottom of his heart he must have 
felt that if he could do no more with such a supe- 
riority in numbers as he had on November 30, he 
had very little reason to look forward with confidence 



.102 Robert Blake 

to an encounter with equal numbers. It was tlius that 
Englishmen reasoned. The reports of the battle were 
read with pride. The Council of State thanked Blake 
for his services, and began to equip a fleet strong enough 
to contend for the command of the Channel. According 
to the general practice of the Long Parliament, this great 
force was to be put under command of a committee. 
Deane, who had been working at Whitehall or fighting 
in Scotland, was sent back to his command at sea. He 
joined Blake on board the ' Triumph.' Monk was now 
for the first time sent to serve as an admiral. In ad- 
dition to providing for the command, the Council of 
State looked to the manning of the fleet. There had 
been some falling off" in the eagerness with which men 
had volunteered at the beginning of the war. The 
pressgang was a great resource, but though efficient, it 
was difficult to work, and if used with severity was 
likely to do infinite mischief to the by no means 
robust popularity of the Commonwealth among the 
sailors. Men, when they knew they were hunted, instinc- 
tively did their best to escape. There were fights in 
some places. Occasionally the pressgang only secured 
a haul of useless landsmen, who had to be let go. The 
local authorities in the seaports were often themselves 
shipowners, and it was hard to make them deprive 
themselves of sailors in order to man the fleet of the 
State. Colonel Overton, governor of Hull, found it 
necessary to threaten to send the Mayor and constables 
of the town to serve against the Dutch themselves, if 
they did not show more zeal to forward the press. 
Without neglecting this approved method of making 
up crews, the Council of State wisely decided to see 



The Duel with Tromp 103 

what could be done by making tbe service more popular. 
It improved tlie regulations for the distribution of prize- 
money, gave volunteers advances on their pay, and 
enabled them to set aside a part for the use of their 
families during their absence. By force, or by persua- 
sion, the great fleet was manned, and by the beginning 
of February Blake, Deane, and Monk, helped by Penn, 
Lawson, and many other seamen, were off Portland Avith 
seventy sail. 

They had no need to go in search of Tromp, who 
must needs bring his merchant ships right past them. 
On Friday, February 18, he was seen coming up the 
Channel with a huge convoy of at least 150 sail under 
his wing. His war-ships were between them and the 
English, and were well together. The wind was in 
favour of the Dutch. When Blake caught sight of his 
enemy, his own line was not yet formed. His squadron, 
the Bed, was with him, but the White was far off to the 
eastward, and the Blue was at some distance to the west. 
As in the case of the fight off Dungeness, Blake engaged 
superior numbers with something even like rashness. 
Tromp, who had his fleet in hand and the wind in his 
favour, would naturally take the initiative, and seize 
upon an opportunity to crush his enemy in detail, but 
no attempt was made to avoid him by the English 
admirals. Deane was on board the ' Triumph ' with 
Blake, and the two, supported by barely a dozen ships, 
engaged the whole force of the Dutch. On this occasion 
the adventure was justified by the results, but the iso- 
lated ships suffered very severely. The fight began at 8 
o'clock in the morning, and several hours passed before 
they received any support. Nothing gives a higher 



104 Robert Blake 

opinion of tlie obstinate courage of the seamen of the 
Commonwealtli, than that this handful of vessels sh6uld 
have borne the brunt of a struggle with Tromp's superior 
numbers for so long without being completely crushed. 
They were shattered in hull and rigging, some of them 
so severely that they had to crawl into Portsmouth that 
night as best they could, and the loss of life was great. 
On board the ' Triumph ' a hundred men fell. Her cap- 
tain, Ball, and Mr. Sparrow, the Admiral's secretary, were 
killed on her deck. In the heat of the fight Blake was 
wounded in the thigh by a splinter, which also tore a 
piece out of the breeches of his colleague, Deane. He 
was spared to die by the side of Monk four months 
later in the great battle in June. But though the 
' Triumph's ' masts were down, or going over her side, 
though her crew was thinned and hull shattered, her 
flag was still flying when Penn, Lawson, and Monk did 
at last struggle up against the wind into the line of 
battle. The last hours of daylight were spent in a 
general engagement, and when darkness came on the 
fleets separated, Tromp to look after his convoy, and the 
English to watch him. 

Blake and his flagship were both in very ill case, 
but the ^ Triumph ' remained with the fleet, though too 
badly crippled to take part in the rest of this ' very 
stupendous ' action. The superlative is Clarendon's. 
During the night the two fleets continued working 
slowly along the Channel towards the Straits of Dover, 
and on Saturday morning the struggle began again, to 
last all day, and to be renewed on Sunday. On the 
second day the English fleet had the wind, and pressed 
in to pierce the Dutch line and reach the eagerly 



The Duel with Tromp 105 

desired mercliant ships. These last made all the haste 
they could along the French coast, huddled together 
and looking anxiously back at the fight going on behind 
them. Tromp did his duty splendidly, and was man- 
fully supported by De Ruyter and Evertzen, but before 
night fell the advantage had begun to lean to the 
English side. One Dutch ship of more than 1,300 tons, 
carrying the flag of a rear-admiral, struck to Captain 
John Lawson, of the ' Fairfax.' This valiant Yorkshire- 
man, who had fought his way up from before the mast 
of a collier, and who ' was indeed of all the men of that 
time, and of that extraction and education, incomparably 
the modestest and the wisest man, and most worthy 
man to be confided in,' was the hero of the day in the 
English fleet, but he was thoroughly backed up. So 
clearly was the fight going against the Dutch, that the 
ships of the convoy began to throw cargo overboard to 
lighten themselves for flight. 

Still, as Penn, remembering these three days after- 
wards, told the Duke of York, a Dutchman is never so 
dangerous as when he is desperate. When Sunday 
came, Tromp was seen making for the shallows of the 
French coast at Calais, with his fleet in a half-moon, 
and the convoy in its arms. The third battle was as 
savage as the first and second, but more decisive. 
Before night several Dutch men-of-war had been sunk 
or taken. Some of the captains are said to have failed 
their indomitable admiral in his great need. At last 
Penn, with a squadron of frigates, burst through the 
broken line and captured some fifty merchant ships. 
The English sailors passed Sunday night preparing for 
great captures on the morrow. They were disappointed. 



io6 Robert Blake 

Tromp saw that he must use the hours of darkness if 
he wished to save his charge. At sundown he anchored 
in the shallows near Calais, and then sent orders to his 
captains to take advantage of the turn of the tide, and 
make the best of their way home. He was obeyed by 
men who knew every inch of the coast, the exact force 
of every current, and the value of every puff of wind. 
On Monday morning the winds and the tide had carried 
the Dutch beyond reach, and Tromp led the bulk of his 
convoy and his battered fleet into the Texel after all. 

Very shortly, if not immediately after the three 
days' battle, Blake was compelled by his wound to give 
up active service for the present. He had caught cold 
in his wound on going ashore, and fell seriously ill at 
Portsmouth. Here he lay until June, attended by 
Dr. Daniel Whistler, who had been sent down from 
London to look after the sick and wounded seamen. In 
itself the wound was not serious. The danger came 
from the cold and its attendant fever. Still, the 
Admiral's life does not seem ever to have been in danger. 
Dr. Daniel Whistler found him mending in March, and 
was only doubtful of the issue on account of his age. 
^ De senibus non est temere sperandum ' was the maxim 
, he quoted to Sir Harry Vane, which is one of the innu- 
merable proofs of how greatly the standard of old age 
has risen during the last two centuries. Blake was 
only fifty-four when the doctor wrote of him as a man 
of such advanced age that any accident might be ex- 
pected to be fatal. 

Blake's reputation for humanity to his men permits 
the supposition that his own convalescence was darkened 
by knowing that he was surrounded by hundreds of 



The Duel with Tromp 107 

sick and wounded seamen wlio were miserably dying 
from want of the most necessary help, or slowly recover- 
ing in spite of the most adverse circumstances. The 
Government was little if at all to blame for the suffer- 
ings of the seamen. Humanity a.part — and the Common- 
wealth men were far from wanting in kindly sympathy 
for their humbler servants — there was every motive of 
interest to make them anxious to help the sailors. 
What the Government could do it did. Doctors were 
sent from London to organise impromptu hospitals. 
Food, medicine, and clothes were supplied as abundantly 
as was possible. Still, with all its zeal, the Admiralty 
Committee was able to do miserably little. There was, 
in fact, no organisation in existence to meet such a 
crisis. Doctors might be sent, and food, and medicine, 
but the medical men had no staff of nurses to obey 
their orders, no proper hospital to put their patients 
into, no one to help them in collecting and distributing 
the supplies needed. In the letter which reports the 
recovery of Blake, Dr. Whistler draws a shocking 
picture of the state of the wounded. One after another 
he enumerates the things which might be avoided if 
only ' some capacious place, with good air, water, and 
convenience of landing were procured.' If such a thing 
existed it would not be necessary to leave the men long 
exposed before they could be received anywhere 5 they 
would not lie long in private houses before the surgeons 
saw them, in want of medicine and linen. It would be 
possible to feed them. From all which it would appear 
that the sick and wounded often lay for days starving 
in garrets at the mercy of harpies who looked upon 
them as a mere means of making money. ' The want of 



io8 Robert Blake 

linen and medicines, tlie difficulties of diet and nursing, 
the thronging of weak men into poor stifling houses, 
and the temptations to drink in victualling houses that 
have no other but strong drink, here where the water 
is brackish,' could all be avoided if only there was a 
hospital. But there was none, and the utmost exertions 
of the Admiralty Commissioners could at best only 
make a very wretched state of things a little less bad 
than it might have been. Something was done to pro- 
vide for the future. The Commissioners began to talk 
at least of securing Porchester Castle as a hospital, and 
a beginning was made in the formation of a thoroughly 
efficient medical service. 

While Blake was still too weak to resume his com- 
mand, an event occurred to which the speculations of 
biographers have given a quite fictitious importance 
in his life. On April 19, 1653, Cromwell turned the 
Rump into the streets, and put the key of the House 
of Commons into his pocket. It is of course always 
interesting to know of any man of that generation 
whether he was friend or enemy to Oliver Cromwell. The 
question suggests itself in regard to Blake as well as 
others. If it is to be answered by the help of known 
facts only, there could be no doubt as to the Admiral's 
opinions. He would seem, by his whole conduct during 
the last four years of his life, to have thought that the 
Protector was the man most capable of governing, and 
the fittest to be obeyed. From the first he served the 
Protectorate loyally. Blake never fell into opposition, 
with Lambert, Ludlow, or Sir Harry Vane \ he never 
intrigued with the Koyalists like Penn or Yenables; 
he was never found acting with unruly fanatics like 



The Duel with Tromp 109 

Lawson. Whether in civil employment on shore, or in 
command at sea, he was always the trustworthy servant 
of the new ruler. There is no jot or tittle of direct 
evidence that he ever doubted the right of Cromwell to 
govern. 

With his recorded actions on one side, and no proof 
of his private feelings on the other, it would seem to 
be the simplest thing to believe that he agreed with 
Milton in accepting Cromwell's government, not as a 
mere necessity, but with loyalty. It has, however, been 
a commonplace that he was not the Protector's friend. 
One biographer after another has undertaken to tell 
what he really felt at the bottom of his heart ; and 
however much they may differ in their explanations, 
there is one point on which they all agree. It is that 
Blake's convictions and his conduct were in flagrant 
contradiction with one another. He has been supposed 
to have disapproved of the execution of the King, or to 
have regretted the fall of the monarchy, or to have 
secretly bewailed the ruin of the ' liberty ' which 
notoriously flourished under the Rump. While he was 
protesting against these things 'in foro intemo,' 
according to the theories, he was manifestly helping to 
do every one of them, or to maintain them when done. 
He not only made no open protest against the execution 
of Charles, but he took his place in the navy commission 
within a few days after the King's head was off*, which 
he could certainly not have done at such a crisis if the 
Commonwealth had had the slightest reason for doubt- 
ing his loyalty to its cause. If he did not consciously 
fight to upset the monarchy, he served the Govern- 
ments which were established on its ruins. For the rest 



no Robert Blake 

when the Civil War began there was no man in England 
who dreamt he was about to do more than try to confine 
the King within the limits of his prerogative. If Blake 
held the cause of liberty dear, he certainly moved 
neither hand nor foot to show that he believed it to 
be bound up with the continued rule of the ragged 
remnant of the Long Parliament. 

Biographers have made ingenious attempts to 
reconcile the apparent discrepancies in Blake's conduct. 
Like the killer of giants, they made their difficulties 
first, and then removed them. The method is simple. 
He is supposed to have felt that he was bound to serve 
his country, however little he approved of its Govern- 
ment. In modern times this would be a sufficient 
explanation of the conduct of a French Legitimist who 
should hold a commission from the Kepublic. It would 
have looked to an Englishman of the seventeenth 
century very like a Jesuitical excuse for being a coward 
and a traitor. Neither the Koyalist nor the Parliamen- 
tarian would have dreamt of distinguishing between his 
cause and the cause of England ; they were one and 
the same thing. When revolutions had begun to make 
men supple, officers were found to serve the ruling 
powers, while they were secretly sending offers of 
devotion to the King de jure ; but they hid their conduct, 
and when it was discovered the world had a rough 
name for it. Nothing of the sort can be proved against 
Blake. Until it is, he is entitled to be considered an 
honest man, which in the school he was trained in, 
meant that he fought for no cause in which he did not 
believe. If he had disapproved of the execution of the 
King he would have refused to serve his slayers. If, 



The Duel with Tromp hi 

like Fairfax, he had been shocked by the execution, and 
frightened at its possible consequences, he also would 
have taken the first opportunity to retire to his estate. 
If he had been a republican of the Vane stamp, he would 
have declined to obey Cromwell. Even if he could not 
honourably retire during the Dutch war, nothing com- 
pelled him to command the Protector's fleet in the 
Mediterranean, or to direct that gigantic buccaneering 
enterprise, the attack on Spain. 

On the supposition that he was an honest man 
Blake's conduct is perfectly consistent, and needs no 
explanation. He fought for the Parliament as a Puritan, 
he approved of the King's execution, because like many 
others he saw that Charles could not be trusted to 
accept the consequences of defeat, and because he, too, 
considered his sovereign guilty of treason to his office, 
and therefore deserving of death. He accepted the 
Protectorate because he believed that Oliver Cromwell 
could be better trusted with the Puritan cause, which was 
also in his eyes the cause of England, than the worn-out 
remnant of the Long Parliament which was trying by 
providing for the re-election of certain members, and so 
forth, to effect a usurpation every whit as contrary to 
the spirit of the English constitution as anything done 
by the army. Merely as a fighting man, his sympathies 
would be with the great soldier as against a handful of 
lawyers and pedants. There is no evidence on the point, 
but it is far from unlikely that Blake knew more or less 
what was to happen in April. He was not one of the 
men who were by Cromwell's side throughout the war 
but their acquaintance was of long standing. They had 
met in the West during the campaign after Naseby. 



112 Robert Blake 

The offer of a major-general's command in Ireland showed 
that the future Protector knew and trusted him. At 
Whitehall and in the Downs they had worked together. 
Blake cannot have been ignorant of Cromwell's decision 
to force on some settlement of the nation, nor can he 
have been blind to what was patent enough to the rest 
of the world — the extreme likelihood of some action by 
the army against the Rump. As he neither tried to 
oppose it nor showed any displeasure when it was done, 
he must be supposed to have accepted it as inevitable. 

The adhesion of the fleet to Cromwell was expressed 
by Monk and Deane, who were with the ships at Spit- 
head. One of the stock stories about Blake is that at 
this crisis he told the seamen they had nothing to do 
with the form of government, but were there to keep 
foreigners from fooling us. Something of the sort he 
may probably have said to cut short dangerous talk, 
but it can hardly have been at a time when he seems 
to have been confined to his bed. He was able to take 
only a very small share in the rest of the Dutch war. 
Towards the end of May he returned to active service, 
and took command of the ships fitting out in the 
Thames, but the fleet at sea was led by Monk and 
Deane. On June 2 these Admirals brought Tromp to 
action off the Gable, and defeated him. In the heat of 
the battle Deane fell, cut in two by a cannon shot, and 
Monk, with all his usual stolid courage, threw his mantle 
over the mutilated body of his colleague, and continued 
coolly to direct the fight. Blake had hurried out his 
squadron of eighteen sail on hearing that an engage- 
ment was pending, but he did not join until the morning 
of June 3, in time to share in the pursuit of Tromp 



The Duel with Tromp 113 

along the coast of Flanders. The battle was not his 
battle, and it was the last in which he took even a 
subordinate part in this war. His illness had been 
only half cured when he came back to duty, and 
returned upon him amid the fatigues of cruising with 
such violence, that he was compelled to resign his 
command. He landed at Walderswick on July 5, and 
left Monk, Penn, and Lawson to end the Dutch war. 



J 1 4 Robert Blake 



CHAPTER VIII. 

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

Blake took at least a nominal part in the administrative 
work of Cromwell's Government. He was one of tlie 
members of the Little or Barebones Parliament, and 
a commissioner for pnrging the Chm^ch of ignorant, 
scandalous, and inefficient ministers. There is no evi- 
dence and no probability that he was an active member 
of these bodies. The ignorant, scandalous, and inefficient 
clergy of Somersetshire can hardly have suffered much 
from him during his sick leave at Bridgewater, even if he 
went there, and by the end of September he was back 
on his proper element. His name would appear in the 
Parliament and on the commission simply because it 
was Cromwell's obvious interest to include the greatest 
possible number of Englishmen of distinction among 
the o^Den supporters of his Government. 

His appointment as one of the commissioners of 
the navy was undoubtedly more than a matter of form. 
By this time he must have possessed a wider knowledge 
of naval affairs than any living Englishman. If he 
had not the seamanship of Lawson, Penn, or Stayner, he 
had, what they had not, a long familiarity with the 
administration of the service. Still, even in his own 



In the Mediterranean 



IIS 



line, it was as admiral at sea tliat he was employed. 
From the end of 1654 till his death in August 1657, 
he was cruising incessantly. The duties of his office 
were varied enough. Like so many of his successors, 
and not a few of the naval officers even of to-day, he had 
far more to do than merely look after the discipline of his 
squadron and fight on occasion. He had to negotiate 
with foreign princes, and co-operate in carrying out the 
policy of his Government, acting on secret and often 
contingent instructions, choosing on his own responsi- 
bility the time and means for attaining the end imposed 
on him by Cromwell. 

In the earlier part of 1654 he was engaged in the 
Channel. The Dutch war was at an end, but there 
was plenty to do in enforcing the Navigation Act, which 
forbade the employment of Dutch vessels in the English 
carrying trade. Then, too, there were those familiar pests, 
the privateers of Dunkerque and St. Maloes. At the 
present moment they were sure to be particularly active. 
Cromwell's Government was in a state of active, though 
unavowed hostility, both to France and Spain. During 
the summer of 1654 a great armament was preparing 
in England, and as yet there was some doubt as to its 
destination. The French suspected that it was designed 
against them, and especially against the Duke of Guise, 
who was preparing for that astounding expedition of 
his to Naples. The Spaniards believed that it was 
meant for the West Indies. They were right and, little 
credit to their sagacity either, for they had fair warning. 
Cromwell had already demanded free trade with America, 
and the exemption of Englishmen from the jurisdiction 
of the Inquisition, and had received the well-known 

I 2 



1 1.6 Robert Blake 

answer from Don Alonso de Cardenas, ' My master 
lias but two eyeSj and you ask him for both.' The 
expedition of Venables and Penn to the West Indies, 
and the entry of Blake into the Mediterranean were the 
Protector's countercheck-quarrelsome to Don Alonso's 
quip-courteous. 

In deciding to put out his Catholic Majesty's eyes, 
Cromwell was doing a thoroughly popular thing. His 
enemies, after the Restoration, and his critics since, 
have accused him of committing a great blunder in this 
attack on Spain, on the ground that he was helping on 
the advance of the French power. Both forget that 
the Protector took guarantees. The possession of Dun- 
kerque and Mardyk would have enabled a Government 
directed with half his ability and courage to stop any 
French attack on the Low Countries easily. When 
the two expeditions sailed, Englishmen were more con- 
cerned in trying to obtain the right of trade to the 
West Indies, and in chaining up the Inquisition, than in 
quarrelling against France, which was still torn by the 
war of the Fronde. The trade question was and re- 
mained a standing cause of quarrel which flamed up a 
century later into the too notorious war of Jenkins' ear. 
The Inquisition was already in a comparatively harmless 
state, but it was still capable of mischief, and the 
memory of its former vigour was lively. English 
skippers and even residents in Spanish towns got on, 
for the most part, well enough with the natives, but 
every now and then the Holy Office would seize on one 
of them for some real or imaginary attempt at prosely- 
tism, and then their case was evil indeed. A brother 
of Admiral Penn's, settled as a merchant at Seville, was 



In the Mediterranean 117 

imprisoned and ruined for being so ill-advised as to marry 
a Spanish woman. Penn took a limited revenge by 
grievously ill-treating an unlucky Spanish gentleman 
whom he found in a Royalist prize. To give the same 
answer to the Inquisition on a much larger scale would 
have greatly pleased the seamen, all the more that it 
could so easily be combined with the seizure of West 
Indian islands, and the capture of Plate ships whereof 
the sailor dreamt. 

Two expeditions left England about the same time 
to attack Spain. • Penn and Venables sailed for the 
West Indies with six thousand soldiers, Blake left 
about the same time for the Straits with five-and-twenty 
sail. It is characteristic of the beautiful irregularity 
of people's ideas as to international relations in those 
times that Blake had no orders to make a general attack 
on Spain. By a convenient extension of the good old 
principle ' There is no peace beyond the line,' Cromwell 
felt justified in making a limited war. He resolved to 
attack so much of Spain as was trade with the West 
Indies, and no more. For the rest, nothing was to be done 
till news came from Penn and Venables — nothing at least 
which could frighten the Spaniard into stopping the 
Plate fleet. In the meantime there was plenty for the 
squadron to do. 

In the first place there was a settlement to be made 
with the Italian prince who had harboured Rupert, and 
then there were the Barbary pirates to be argued with. 
During the early months of 1655 Blake was on the 
coast of Italy and Sicily, enforcing the arguments of 
diplomatists by a timely display of force. That a satis- 
factory arrangement was made is certain, but there is 



n8 Robert Blake 

less reason for believing that it was done in tlie pleasant 
way reported by tradition. According to this authority, 
which is always so much more agreeable than trust- 
worthy, Blake first forced the Duke of Tuscany to pay 
a handsome sum by threatening to bombard Leghorn, 
and then did a thing infinitely pleasing to the English 
mind in its then unregenerate condition. The Duke 
excused himself from paying all he was asked for, on the 
ground that many of Rupert's prizes had been sold in the 
Papal States. Blake, nothing loth, sailed for OivitaYecchia, 
and threatened to come up to Rome itself if sixty thou- 
sand ducats were not paid, and that speedily. Hereupon, 
in much trepidation, the Pope and Cardinals found the 
money, the only bullion ever sent from the Eternal City 
to England to counterbalance the vast sums carried in 
the opposite direction. The modesty of the story is in 
its favour, for if tradition did put her hand to making 
it, there seems no reason why she should have stopped 
there. It would have been just as easy for her to repre- 
sent Blake as having treated the Pope, or at least a 
Cardinal, as Amyas Leigh did the Bishop of Carthagena. 
Whether the English Admiral schooled the Italian 
princes precisely in this fashion or not, his mere presence 
on their coasts, with a fleet manifestly capable of sweeping 
the Mediterranean, was a useful lesson. During the 
Dutch war, a handful of English ships under the com- 
mand of Captain Badiley had been blockaded by Van 
Galen in Leghorn, and when they had been irritated 
into recapturing the ' Phoenix ' from the Hollanders by a 
very dashing piece of cutting out, the Duke had com- 
pelled them to put to sea, where they were overpowered 
by numbers. Badiley had unquestionably infringed 



In the Mediterranean 119 

the neutrality of the Tuscan port, but not until the 
Dutch had been allowed to do so. The Italian princes 
believed the States to be the strongest of the sea powers, 
and it was part of Cromwell's vigorous foreign policy to 
disabuse them. This had been effected by the cruise of 
Blake's squadron. 

From the coast of Tuscany, the Romagna, and Naples, 
through waters which were to be familiar enough with 
the red, white, and blue ensigns in future days, Blake 
proceeded to the coast of Sicily. Here, although he 
well knew that the ultimate object of his cruise was an 
attack on Spain, he had no scruple in applying to the 
Spanish Viceroys, who still ruled, and for half a century 
were to rule over the island, for leave to revictual his 
squadron, on the ground of the friendly relations of the 
two countries, and indeed the work immediately on hand 
touched the Italians and Spaniards as nearly as the 
English. He was about to proceed against the Barbary 
pirates who were hostes liumani generis^ and particularly 
the foes of the peoples of the Mediterranean shore. 
Ever since Barbarossa, the renegade, had founded the 
great piratical power of Algiers, the towns of the Barbary 
coast, from Tripoli to Sallee, had been sending out 
swarms of these skimmers of the waves. A horde of 
renegades, owing a nominal obedience to the Sultan, 
came forth every summer in light-built craft, swift under 
sail and easy to row, crowded with fighting men and 
slaves for the oar. The most renowned of these leaders 
were Christian renegades. Barbarossa and his brother 
were Calabrians, and their successors had been as them- 
selves. In the early seventeenth century two English- 
men, Sir Francis Verney, a Buckinghamshire squire, and 



120 Robert Blake 

a deserter from tlie navy named Ward, liad been con- 
spicuous among the pirate chiefs. They and their like 
not only plundered ships, but made forays on the coasts 
of Spain and Italy in search of slaves, the most valuable 
form of booty. The exiled Moriscoes delighted to show 
them the way to the least defensible points of Andalusia 
and Valencia. Cervantes, who, as all men know, had him- 
self suffered a long captivity ; the lesser Spanish story 
writers ; the authors of the ' Novelas de Picaros ; ' and 
Le Sage, all use capture and imprisonment among the 
Barbary pirates as familiar incidents in a tale of adven- 
ture. To this day, when a Spaniard wishes to warn you 
to be on the look-out for squalls, he says with solemn 
gaze, ' Hay Moros por la costa ' — the Moors are on the 
coast. Yerney, Ward, and many another of different 
races, helped to fill the slave-markets and harems of 
the East with Christian captives. In 1 655 the power 
of the slave-hunting States had somewhat diminished. 
The days when twenty of Ward's ships could be de- 
stroyed by a Spanish admiral at once without seriously 
weakening the strength of the pirates were gone, but 
Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were still sending out 
cruisers which returned in most cases full of merchan- 
dise taken from the Christians, and each with its string 
of men strong enough for labour, and women or chil- 
dren beautiful enough to be saleable. The captives were 
exhibited naked in the slave-market for the Dey to 
choose his percentage, and the residue was then sold. 
A large proportion of the men turned renegades, and 
became slave-hunters in their turn. Few of the famous 
leaders of early times, if any, were Turks or Arabs by race. 
English commerce had suffered like the rest, and on 



In the Mediterranean 121 

one sliameful occasion, already mentioned, a Flemish 
renegade had plundered Baltimore, on the south coast 
of Ireland. It is only the other day that the ludicrous 
misappropriation of the charity known as Smith's Poor 
Kindred reminded Englishmen that it was once a pious 
duty to provide for the ransom of captives of our race. 
As yet little had been done to protect our commerce 
from these attacks. Elizabeth had negotiated, and 
James had sent a fleet which did nothing effectual. 
Charles and the Parliament had been too busy on other 
things. There were accordingly always a number of 
English prisoners in the Barbary ports, sometimes as 
many as from two to three hundred in Algiers alone. 
Some of them were men of education who have left 
written accounts of their miseries. These narratives do 
not altogether support the familiar stories of wanton 
cruelty exercised on the slaves. In most cases they 
seem to have fallen into the hands of humane or even 
only indifferent masters, who, in consideration of a small 
daily payment, allowed them to work for themselves. 
Still, such negative good treatment was a poor consolation 
for exile and slavery. 

At some time in the course of March Blake was off 
Algiers attempting to come to an arrangement with the 
Dey. It does not seem to have been any part either of 
his instructions or of his intentions to fight if he could 
effect his object by negotiations. He was prepared to 
buy the release of English captives. There is something 
grotesque, and at times revolting, in the solemn negotia- 
tions undertaken by English consuls and captains with 
the Dey of Algiers. It seems hardly credible that the 
representatives of England should ever have had to argue 



122 Robert Blake 

solemnly with, the barbarian chief of a population of 
kidnappers, with intent to persuade him that the average 
price of an English man or woman should be so many- 
ducats, and should have to haggle over the money value 
of their own flesh and blood. Sometimes when a 
bargain had been made it was found that the goods 
delivered were not according to invoice. This, that, 
and the other slave were missing. Then the consul or 
the admiral expostulated, and was informed that the 
articles in question had passed by lawful sale into the 
hands of third parties, and could not be recovered. 
Occasionally the Dey lost his temper, and furiously asked 
whether the dogs of unbelievers thought his patience 
had no end. It must be remembered, however, that 
kidnapping and slave-holding were not considered sins 
in themselves by our fathers, not even when the victims 
were Englishmen. The colonies were largely recruited 
by these very means. In James's reign a couple of 
impostors excited a panic among the female population 
of the Western counties by giving out, for purposes of 
extortion, that they were commissioned by the King to 
press young women for Virginia. So little did their 
story appear incredible, that many girls ran away and 
hid themselves. During the civil wars strings of 
Cavalier and Scotch prisoners were exported to the 
plantations of Barbadoes, Virginia, and New England. 
Lord Macaulay has told how the Queen and the Maids 
of Honour turned an honest penny on the prisoners 
after the Western rising in 1685. Kidnapping for the 
plantations was an active criminal industry, as may be 
seen by Defoe's novels and the very authentic history 
of Esquemeling, the buccaneer. In the seventeenth 



In the Mediterranean ■ 123 

century, therefore, Englishmen, though they would exert 
themselves for their countrymen enslaved in Algiers or 
Tunis, did not do it with any lively horror at slavery 
itself. Any such feeling would have been even a trifle 
ridiculous, in Bristol, for instance, whose every brick 
was cemented with the blood of a nigger, as the drunken 
actor reminded the townsmen. When captives had to 
be rescued from the Algerines there was no consideration 
of sentiment to prevent Englishmen from making a 
bargain, and keeping the employment of force as a 
reserve in case the Dey proved unreasonable. 

In the last days of March Blake arrived at Tunis, 
and found the Dey even more insolent than his brother 
at Algiers. He would neither hear of taking ransom 
nor give securities for the future, nor even allow the 
squadron to buy bread and water. Blake, according to 
the writer who invented vai^ous other sayings for him, 
hereupon twirled his whiskers, meaning his moustache 
doubtless, and sententiously observed that bread and 
water were the common right of humanity. He was 
certainly guiltless of this large and withal pointless 
assertion, but the twirling of the moustache is just 
possible. His portraits represent him as clean-shaven, 
but they are of little authority, and he may have worn 
a moustache, as Cromwell and Ireton did. With or 
without the gesture, he warned the Dey to take care, 
and was promptly told to look at the forts and ships. 

The Dey's confidence in his forts and fighting vessels 
was by no means without justification. Tunis, which is 
near by the ruins of Carthage, lies in a position designed 
by nature for a great seaport. It is at the bottom, or, 
as the seamen of the seventeenth century would have 



124 • Robert Blake 

said, in tlie cod of a wedge-shaped bay. Cape Bon to 
tlie east, and Biserta, itself a naval station made to the 
hand of any power with intelligence to use it, to the 
west, mark the seaward ends. Before Tunis could be 
reached, Porto Farina and the great fortress known as 
the Goletta must be mastered. It had been taken and 
lost in the wars of Charles Y. and Don John of Austria. 
Cervantes had been there with Don John two years 
after Lepanto, and while he was still a soldier in the 
tercio of Don Lope de Figueroa. He has described 
the loss of the town, when Philip II., with all his usual 
procrastination and meanness, allowed it to be taken by 
Uluch Ali, in the story of the captive Ruy Perez de 
Yiedma. Since it had fallen into the hands of the 
true believers, it had been a pirate stronghold of only 
less fame than Algiers itself. Now the Dey was con- 
fident in his power to repel any assault. He drew his 
nine cruisers up in front of the mole of Porto Farina, 
and defied the English to come on. 

Though Blake must have resolved already to take 
him at his word, he did not accept the challenge at 
once. Leaving a squadron to watch the port, he took 
the heavier ships to the coast of Sardinia. This 
measure has been accounted for by his need of pro- 
visions, but Blake cannot have expected to find munitions 
of war at Cagliari, and no others were wanted for an 
attack on Tunis. It is more probable that he was 
anxious to avoid a bomba-rdment if he could, for the 
town was part of the dominions of the Sultan, and it 
was not the interest of England, which had a great 
Levant trade, to quarrel with the sovereign of Turkey. 
He might therefore be willing to try whether a blockade 



In the Mediterranean 12.5 

.would not tame the obstinacy of the Dey, and would 
profit by the interval to water bis ships. When he 
returned, the Tunisian was as obstinate as ever. It was 
now necessary, if our trade was not to be ruined by the 
insolence of the pirates, to show them that the patience 
of England was due to policy, not to pusillanimity. 

On April 4 Blake entered Tunis Bay with his fleet 
in two squadrons. One, formed of the lighter ships, 
consisted of the ' Newcastle,' ' Taunton,' ' Foresight,' 
* Amity,' ' Princess Maria,' ' Pearl,' ' Mermaid,' and 
^ Merlin.' The second included the ' George ' (Blake's 
flagship), the ^ Andrew,' ' Plimouth,' ' Worcester,' ' Uni- 
corn,' ' Bridgewater,' and ' Success.' They stood in with 
the sea-breeze early in the forenoon, and took up their 
positions, each ship, as in the case of Lord Exmouth's 
bombardment of Algiers, probably anchoring by the 
stern within musket shot of the batteries and armed 
moles. Once in their places they opened fire in answer 
to the cannonade of the Turks and Tunisians. The 
object of their attack was Porto Farina, in front of which 
were moored the Dey's nine cruisers. Blake's own 
squadron engaged the forts at musket range or less, 
while his light squadron was to tackle the ships. Before 
long the Dey must have begun to discover that he had 
overlooked one important consideration in his calcula- 
tion of forces, and that was the respective efficiency of 
his own men and the English as gunners. The very 
slight loss of Blake's fleet shows that the practice of the 
Tunisians must have been very bad. When Sir Charles 
Napier, noisiest and dirtiest of British seamen, bom- 
barded Acre two centuries afterwards, Mehemet Ali's 
artillerymen fixed their guns at a certain range, on the 



126 Robert Blake 

calculation that the English must anchor just there. 
Unluckily for them, Sir Charles took his ships much 
nearer, so that the Egyptian bullets went screaming 
harmlessly through his spars. Something of the sort 
may have happened on April 4, 1655. Moreover, the 
sea breeze which blew steadily in throughout the engage- 
ment, sent the smoke of the English guns rolling over 
the forts, to the confusion of what aim the Tunisians 
did try to take. Before long the effect of Blake's steady 
hail of well-directed shot began to be visible. The forts 
were shattered, the guns dismounted, and the moles 
swept. Then when the fire from the batteries was well 
beaten down, the English long-boats and cutters were 
manned, and driven through the smoke straight at the 
pirate ships. Cutlasses, boarding pikes, and pistols 
made quick work of whatever opposition was offered on 
their decks, and every one of them was soon in flames. 
When the English stood out to sea that evening, with 
the satisfaction of men who had at last done a long 
wished for piece of work, and done it well, Porto Farina 
was rudely shattered, and the nine ships the Dey had 
pointed out to their attention a few days before were 
hopelessly blazing before his eyes. There were men in 
the forecastles of the fleet who had sailed the Mediterra- 
nean in fear, or had even stood in the slave-market, and 
who must have turned in that night with the feeling that 
they had at last paid a good instalment of a long score. 
The letter in which Blake, who was by no means 
sure that this attack on a vassal of the Sultan would 
be approved of, reported his action to the Protector 
deserves quotation. After giving an account of the 
abortive negotiations for a peaceful settlement, he goes 
on, 'Their barbarous provocations did so work upon 



In the Mediterranean 127 

our spirits tliat we judged it necessary for tlie lionour 
of the fleet, our nation, and religion, seeing they would 
not deal with us as friends, to make them feel us as 
enemies, and it was thereupon resolved, at a council 
of war, to endeavour the firing of their ships at Porto 
Farina. The better to effect the same we drew off 
again, and sailed to Trapani, so that they might be 
the more sure. After a stay of some days there, we set 
sail back for Porto Farina, where we arrived the 3rd 
instant (April) in the afternoon, and met again at a 
council of war, at which it was resolved, by the permis- 
sion of God, to put in execution our former intentions. 
Accordingly, next morning, very early, we entered 
with the fleet into the harbour, and anchored before 
their castles, the Lord being pleased to favour us with 
a gentle gale off the sea, which cast all the smoke upon 
them and made our work the more easy, for after some 
hours' dispute we set on fire all their ships, which were 
nine in number, and, the same favourable gale still 
continuing, we retreated out again into the Eoads. We 
had 25 men slain and about 40 hurt, with very little 
other loss. We are even now setting sail to go to 
Algiers, that being the only place that can afford us a 
considerable supply of bread and flesh if they will.' 

It is a pious and modest account of a valiant action, 
but like the writing of all the men of the time except 
Cromwell, a little colourless, wholly without individua- 
lity. Eeynolds or Morgan, Lawson or Deane, would 
have written just such another. 

After the lesson taught them at Tunis, the Barbary 
States became amenable to reason. Captives were 
released on the payment of a moderate ransom, and 
promises of good behaviour were made for the future. 



128 Robert Blake 

Even after the victory, however, there was no attempt 
on the part of the English to rely on the sword alone. 
The Algerines were not deprived of their property 
without compensation, in spite of the dubious character 
of their right. When some Dutch captives swam off to 
the English fleet at Algiers, the sailors subscribed a 
dollar apiece to buy them their freedom. Blake even 
tried to recover some Turks, who were prisoners in the 
hands of the Knights of St. John at Malta, and had 
a tiff of fighting with these military monks who were 
every whit as great slave-hunters as the Algerines. 

This cruise is one of the most important in the 
history of the English navy. The mere fighting alone 
was of what it is convenient, though possibly a little 
pompous, to call an epoch-making character, for the 
attack on Porto Farina was the first thing of its kind 
done on a large scale and with complete success. 
Clarendon went beyond his text when he said that 
Blake first taught sailors to despise castles on shore, 
but he was not speaking without book. The Earl of 
Essex — the Parliament's Earl, not Elizabeth's — had 
battered down a fort at Cadiz with a single ship, long 
before, and a few other such pieces of service were done 
elsewhere. Still the bombardment of Porto Farina, 
and the burning of the Dey's nine war-vessels, was one 
of those conspicuous pieces of fighting which all the 
world sees and remembers. Sailors did not learn then, 
and have not learnt since, to despise castles on shore 
when the said castles are too strong to be attacked. 
But they did prove that some castles may be tackled 
with success, and with practice they got to put the 
standard of manageable strength much higher than it 



In the Mediterranean 129 

had ever been before. The capture of Cadiz in Elizabeth's 
reign was, it must not be forgotten, the work of the land 
forces, and moreover the town, which was one of the 
strongest in Europe in Blake's time, was then very in- 
adequately fortified. 

The novelty of the work Blake did in this cruise 
was, however, not a mere matter of fighting. British 
seamen have on few occasions shown themselves back- 
ward to go where they were ordered. The originality 
of what the Protector's fleet did in the Mediterranean 
during the early months of 1655 lay in this, that it 
marked the end of the period in which our merchant 
ships were expected to protect themselves, and the 
beginning of the better time in which they have had 
the fleet always at hand to protect them. Elizabeth 
had negotiated for her merchants, and had fought on 
occasion. James had threatened strong measures and 
had sent a squadron to Algiers. It had, however, done 
nothing Englishmen had not every reason to forget. 
Neither of these sovereigns, and still less Charles, had 
been able to follow out a consistent policy designed to 
make foreigners understand that a wrong done to the 
meanest of Englishmen was an insult to England which 
would be vigorously avenged. Blake's cruise taught 
this lesson. He had made the round of the Mediter- 
ranean with an irresistible fleet, showing the flag, 
insisting on a settlement of old accounts, and letting 
princes or pirates see the force which could and would 
come to the help of every aggrieved subject of the rulers 
of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1655 the navy came 
to its majority. It passed from being the protector of 
the shores of England, and the force which could carry 

K 



130 Robert Blake 

out an isolated enterprise, into the permanent armed 
chivalry of the sea always at hand to protect all those 
who go upon the sea on their lawful occasions, and the 
untiring enemy of the enemies of mankind, the pirates 
who are hostes humani generis. 

On his way home, Blake had an opportunity of 
showing the Spaniards how dangerous it had become to 
meddle rashly with Englishmen. The story cannot be 
told without a warning. It rests on the authority of 
Bishop Burnet alone, and is therefore not beyond 
question. Still the Bishop has not been shown to be a 
liar for the love of the thing, and in this case he unites 
two of the qualities required to make a trustworthy 
witness. He had the means of knowing the truth, and 
no motive not to tell it. The story, the best known of 
all told about Blake, is this. The fleet put in at Malaga 
on its way home, and was well received. Observe — 
Venables and Penn were bungling over their attack on 
San Domingo during these very months, and were 
seizing Jamaica, there being, according to the inter- 
national law of the time, no peace beyond the line. 
"While the fleet was at anchor in the Eoads leave was 
given to the men. One of the sailors was so rash, or so 
brutal, or so good a puritan, or perhaps only so careless, 
as to do something which the Spaniards interpreted into 
an insult to a religious procession. A monk of notorious 
and popular piety egged the bystanders on to handle 
the heretic roughly. The man got out of their hands, 
and complained to Blake of the assault. Hereupon, the 
English Admiral presented a demand for the punishment 
of the monk to the Viceroy, and was told that the civil 
authorities had no power over the Church. The answer, 
if given, was a cool lie, for the Viceroys of the King of 



In the Mediterranean 131 

Spain liad abundant power to punish ecclesiastics for 
common offences. Of tliis Blake was doubtless well 
aware. He at once answered that, these things being 
so, if the monk was not given up to him, he would at 
the end of a certain time open fire on Malaga. As 
the interval for repentance was drawing to an end, and 
the fleet, with its decks cleared for action, was preparing 
for a repetition of the affair of Porto Farina, a shore 
boat came alongside with the monk. Then, on the 
quarter-deck of the ^ George,' Blake made his great 
declaration touching the rights of the British subject. 
He told the monk that this act of submission was enough, 
that he should not hang him. If the Viceroy had com- 
plained of the sailor, he himself would have punished 
him, but as the Spaniards had taken the law into their 
own hands, he must make them understand that English- 
men were only to be judged by Englishmen. With that 
he sent the too zealous monk back. When Cromwell 
heard this story he was greatly delighted, and uttered 
his famous saying, ' I will make the name of English- 
man to be as much dreaded as ever was the name of 
civis Bomanus ' — the first assertion of a policy now 
somewhat fallen into disuse. 

The tale is supported by dubious direct evidence, 
and yet it is intrinsically not improbable. Even those 
who are punctilious in demanding good security for Sir 
John, must allow Burnet's to be better than Bardolph's. 
The direct statement of a well-informed contemporary, 
who was doubtless somewhat credulous but not wilfully 
mendacious, may be allowed to weigh against the silence 
of State papers. We are drifting into an exclusive 
respect for whatever has been buried in a barrel at the 

K 2 



132 Robert Blake 

Eecord Office, and brought to light by means of a Calendar 
of State Papers. The probabilities are on the whole in 
favour of Burnet. Blake knew well how Spain and 
England stood, and what was the policy of the Protector. 
In these very months he was in receipt of orders to 
intercept the Plate ships, and was about to cruise for 
them off Cadiz. He must unquestionably have shared 
in the general desire and determination of his country- 
men, to teach the Inquisition once and for all to let 
Englishmen alone. The action of the monk would 
give him an excellent opening. His man was un- 
doubtedly in the wrong, but the question at issue was 
whether Spanish ecclesiastics were or were not to be 
sole judges of what was an offence against their religion. 
It could scarcely have been brought to the test better 
than by some such event as this, and there is no ground 
for denying Blake the courage and self-reliance needed 
to act as he is said to have done. The moderation of 
the story is also in its favour, for it does not make him 
claim impunity for Englishmen who insulted the Eoman 
Catholic religion, but only their right not to be left at 
the arbitrary disposal of the clergy. For the rest, the 
story, if not actually true, has what Mr. Carlyle was in 
the habit of calling a mythical truth. Blake was em- 
ployed during all these months in doing just what the 
story said he did. Its popularity, and the general 
credence it received, made it an example to succeeding 
naval officers. While he was on the southern coast of 
Spain, all England was shocked into rage by the per- 
secution of the Protestants of Piedmont. The recent 
memory of Porto Farina, and the knowledge that the 
fleet was there, must have helped to induce the Duke of 
Savoy to listen to Milton's Latin. 



133 



CHAPTER IX. 

CHASING THE PLATE SHIPS. 

Unfortunately for the officers and men of H.M. 
ships and vessels of war, the words Register ship, 
Plate ship, Acapulco ship, are now words of little 
meaning. Never again will it be written that the 
British frigates ' Naiad,' Captain William Pierrepoint, 
^ Ethalion,' Captain James Young, ' Triton,' Captain 
John Gore, and ' Alcmene,' Captain Henry Digby, have 
arrived at Plymouth with the Spanish register ships 
' Thetis ' and ' Santa Brigida,' and that the prize money 
received by the captors was as follows : — 





£ s. 


d. 


Captains 


. each 40,730 18 





Lieutenants . 


. „ 5,091 7 


3 


Warrant officers . 


„ 2,468 10 


9 


Petty officers 


„ 791 17 





Seamen and marines 


182 4 


9 



The same seamen and marines will no more be seen 
roaming about Portsmouth with bank notes stuck in 
their hats, buying watches for the fun of frying them, 
and issuing laws that any of their crews who appeared 
without a gold-laced hat should be cobbed, so that the 



134 Robert Blake 

unlucky man who appeared in silver could only escape 
by representing that the costlier articles were all bought 
up, but he had compelled the shopkeeper to take money 
for gold lace. This spectacle was, however, to be seen 
in our ports during the seventeenth and the last century. 
The capture of the ' Thetis ' and ' Santa Brigida ' hap- 
pened in 1799. 

From the time that Francis Drake captured the 
' Cacafuego,' it had been the dream of the English 
sailor to have the same luck. The prize was worth 
fighting for, as the case of these two ships shows. And 
they were by no means the biggest haul of the kind 
which came into the naval net. Sir Charles Wager 
made 100,0002. of prize money by one such capture in 
the good times of Queen Anne. The wealth of Spain 
was a great object of desire to Protestant England in 
earlier times, and to commercial England in later. To 
Spain herself, it was of little use. She and Portugal 
were, in Adam Smith's phrase, ' the two most beggarly 
nations in Europe,' while their fleets brought home 
bullion to the value of millions every few years. Latterly, 
little of it was even landed in Spain. The Spaniards of 
the seventeenth century were the Damnati ad metalla 
of Europe, in the classical language of the time. The 
gold and silver they dug from their mines supplied the 
market of Europe, but the greater part of it was trans- 
ferred into Dutch ships at sea to meet the bills of the 
Spanish Government, which has anticipated its revenue 
from time immemorial, and was compelled by its 
necessities to connive at this violation of its own laws 
against the export of the precious metals, but for who- 
ever could catch it on blue water the gain was clear. 



Chasing the Plate Ships 135 

And what a booty it was ! Once every year 
there came a great galleon from the Philippines to 
Acapulco, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, laden with 
wealth which was to be exchanged for that part of 
the produce of the Mexican mines not shipped for 
Europe. This was the booty of Drake, Cavendish, and 
Anson. The gold of Peru, the silver of Potosi, the 
emeralds of what is now called Ecuador, were stored at 
Guayaquil, and then carried in great treasure-ships, 
built long and sharp below the water line, to work up 
against the prevailing westerly winds of the Pacific 
coast of South America to Panama. Panama contributed 
its own share in the form of pearls fished out of the 
Gulf called by the Spaniards, who first saw it from the 
peak in Darien, the South Sea. Long recuas of mules 
and slaves — the word has been made familiar by ' "West- 
ward Ho ! ' — carried the treasure over the Isthmus, where 
the galleons were waiting for it. The fleets from Panama 
and La Vera Cruz met in the West Indies, and filled 
up with the produce of the islands. Then with their 
gold, silver, quicksilver, precious stones and pearls, 
stowed away under the captain's cabin, and their holds 
full of sugar, tobacco, hides, and dye wood, they took 
their way for Europe. These priceless cargoes were 
carried in great galleons of from twelve to eighteen 
hundred tons, armed with from forty to sixty cannon. 
A crowd of small craft accompanied them as tenders, 
to supply them with provisions in case of need, and to 
keep a look-out for enemies. The voyage was broken 
at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where the Spaniards had 
kept a garrison ever since the Elizabethan seamen 
had made the Canaries their rendezvous to wait for the 



136 Robert Blake 

treasure-ships. Here in time of war they were met by- 
swift craft from Spain to tell them whether the coast 
was clear, or to warn them to stop if a Dutch or English 
fleet was cruising outside of Cadiz. Even in its last 
stage of decadence the Austrian dynasty had never 
wholly neglected the treasure-ships. When its other 
men-of-war were rotting in harbour, they were kept in 
a tolerably efficient state. The officers and crews were 
generally Basques, or at least seamen from the north 
coast, and strong bodies of picked soldiers served as 
marines. 

To get their arms up to the elbows into all this mass 
of wealth was the dearest ambition of generations of 
seamen. To prevent the Spanish Government from 
using it in support of the Catholic power was no less an 
object with the rulers of England. Hence those innu- 
merable voyages to the islands (i.e. the Canaries and 
Azores) which fill the naval annals of Elizabeth's reign. 
Raleigh and Cumberland, Hawkins and Drake, gentle- 
men captains and tarpaulin captains, had cruised for 
months waiting for the great prize. For the most part 
they had cruised in vain. The Spaniards had too many 
harbours of refuge, were too cautious to be easily caught 
by a big fleet, and when sighted by small squadrons 
were commonly too strong to be attacked. In 1628, 
the Dutchman Pieter Hein captured a treasure fleet, but 
this was a solitary case. It was enough to encourage 
others to try for the same luck though. Even in time 
of peace the treasure-ships were never quite safe, and 
any one of them which fell behind by accident made the 
rest of her voyage in fear and trembling. In a later 
generation the Plate fleet was attacked at its very place 



Chasing the Plate Ships 137 

of lading. The buccaneers, whose heroic period lies 
between 1660 and 1690, grabbed at the booty even 
before it was on board. It was with this object that 
Morgan made his wonderful march across the mountains 
to Panama, and that ' that great sea artist and valiant 
commander, Captain Bartholomew Sharp,' and others, 
seized canoes in the South Sea, and fell upon the coasts 
of Peru. In 1684 the buccaneers, English, Dutch, and 
French, sacked Guayaquil, and there found the accumu- 
lated treasure of years^ wealth beyond the drunkenest 
dreams of Wapping ; but the feats of the buccaneer 
power, that picturesque phase of the secular struggle for 
the trade of America, do not belong in any way to the 
life of Blake. 

The export trade to the Spanish colonies was ma- 
naged in much the same way. Those parts of the 
Catholic King's dominions which were allowed to trade 
with the colonies at all, and the privilege was limited to 
territory of the crown of Castile, were compelled to 
conduct all their business through the city of Seville. 
Ships were laden for America in early times at the 
capital of Andalusia itself, but when the galleons had 
grown too big to be brought up the Guadalquivir, then 
at San Lucar de Barrameda, Puerto de Santa Maria, and 
Cadiz. A squadron cruising off the mouth of the Straits 
was therefore exactly in position to catch the Spaniards 
at their going out and their coming in. 

Blake was to be employed on this work for the rest 
of his life. From the spring of 1655 till the September 
of that year he was cruising between the coast of Africa 
and Lisbon, waiting for the Plate fleet which never 
came, and watching for the outward-bound ships which 



138 Robert Blake 

never put to sea. In 1666 lie returned to the same 
waters on the same task, and went back to England 
only to die at the mouth of Plymouth Sound. Other 
work had to be done incidentally, but the great object 
was always the treasure. Cromwell was thoroughly 
determined to break down the power of Spain in the 
West Indies. Motives of a political, commercial, and 
religious kind made him resolute on that point, but he 
does not seem to have desired a war with Spain in 
Europe. If Philip IV. had been prepared to play the 
game according to Cromwell's rules, to have war beyond 
the line and for the American trade alone, it would seem 
that the Protector would have been content to leave the 
coast of Spain and its European commerce in peace. 
This seems, from our point of view, a monstrous pre- 
tension, but it is astonishing for how long the Govern- 
ment at Madrid was prepared to accept it tacitly. The 
fleet under Penn and Yenables, which had sailed from 
England in December 1654, almost at the same time 
as Blake's squadron, had committed an undoubted 
aggression on the Spanish possessions. It had attacked 
San Domingo, and taken Jamaica, but Philip did not 
declare war for months. Possibly he may have thought 
that the expedition was sufiiciently punished by its own 
mishaps, for indeed, this great buccaneering business 
was on the 'whole a lamentable failure. Of the six 
thousand men it carried, few ever found their way back 
to England. Penn and Venables quarrelled, the soldiers 
began by being disorderly and ended by showing them- 
selves cowards. They were to a large extent old 
Eoyalists, who went to the West Indies because they 
were ruined at home, and the King's soldiers were at 



Chasing the Plate Ships 139 

no time famous for tlieir discipline. The attack on San 
Domingo failed shamefully, and Jamaica, though it was 
taken with little trouble, was then nearly waste, and 
proved for a long time a very costly possession. But if 
Philip IV. was prepared to let things rest as they were, 
Cromwell was not. On the contrary, he was only the 
more resolute to make the Plate fleets pay for the 
failure in the West Indies. 

In June of 1655, before bad news had come from 
the Antilles, Blake had orders of a sufficiently intel- 
ligible sort. In answering the Admiral's report of the 
attack on Tunis the Protector let him know that ' we, 
having taken into consideration the present design we 
have in the West Indies, have judged it necessary that 
not only the King of Spain's fleets coming from thence 
be intercepted (which, as well your former instruc- 
tions as those now sent unto you require and authorise 
you to do), but that we endeavour also, as much as in 
us lies, to hinder him from sending any relief or assist- 
ance thither. You are therefore, during your abode 
with the fleet in those seas, to inform yourself by the 
best means you can concerning the going of the King 
of Spain's fleet for the West Indies : and shall, according 
to such information as you can gain, use your best 
endeavour to intercept at sea and fight with and take 
them, or otherwise to fire and sink them ; as also any 
other of his ships which you shall understand to be 
bound for the West Indies with provisions of war for 
the aid and assistance of his subjects there; carrying 
yourself towards others of his ships and people as you 
are directed by your general instructions.' To carry 
out this policy, which grew stricter as time went on. 



140 Robert Blake 

and ended in general war, was the purpose of Blake's 
two years' cruise. 

Nothing is harder to realise than what this blockad- 
ing work must have meant. From May 1655 until 
August 1657, twenty-seven months in all, Blake was 
occupied with few intervals in sailing to and fro between 
two given points. The incidents which break this 
inonotonous patrolling were the return for a brief space 
to England, Stayner's attack on the Marquis of Badajoz, 
and the bombardment of Santa Cruz. In the intervals 
the Admiral's work cannot have been much more inte- 
resting than the daily rounds of the policeman, and can as 
little be told, even if the biographer were to apply him- 
self, as Gustave Flaubert once deliberately did, to exciting 
in the mind of his reader an intense feeling of boredom. 
Sir Harris Nicolas has quoted some pages from the log 
of Nelson's flagship during the long blockade of Toulon. 
They mark the movements of the fleet for the day, the 
number of tacks made, the sails set and taken in, and 
then set again, the changes in the weather, and the 
number of knots traversed in this direction or in that. 
Multiply these pages by a hundred, and you will pro- 
bably attain to as distinct a conception as can possibly 
be obtained without actual experience of what the 
average work of the navy was in the old wars. The 
battles which fill the histories were the exception, the 
blockades were the rule. And they were something alto- 
gether different from the intervals of marching, or garrison 
work, or mere camping which lie between the soldier's days 
of combat. The sailor was shut off from the rest of man- 
kind, and was not only unable to secure variety, but even 
to get privacy. He passed months in the discharge of the 



Chasing the Plate Ships 141 

same duties, among surroundings wliicli never varied, 
and hardships great even to men brought up from boy- 
hood to a hard life. It is not to be wondered at if the 
sailors indemnified themselves for the monastic seclusion 
of their life on board by rough dissipation when they got 
on shore. The extraordinary rancour and pertinacity 
of naval quarrels may be accounted for, if not excused, 
on the same grounds. 

In the middle of the seventeenth century blockading 
work was new to the English fleet, and was harder than 
it ever became in later times. During Elizabeth's reign 
cruises had been of short duration. Drake and Caven- 
dish had indeed been absent on their great voyages of 
circumnavigation for two years on a stretch, but they 
spent much of that time in harbours on the American 
coast or among the islands of the Indian Ocean. Until 
Blake set the example, it was an unheard of thing to 
keep a great fleet at sea all through the winter, and even 
he and his immediate successors were in the habit of 
sending the heavier ships home at the approach of the 
stormy months. Indeed, the difliculty of keeping a large 
naval force at a distance from England was fifty times 
greater than it was in the eighteenth century. Until 
Rooke took G-ibraltar, we had not a single naval station 
in foreign European waters. A squadron in the Medi- 
terranean had to depend for supplies on ships sent out 
from home, or on what it could get for love or money in 
neutral ports. The Admiralty correspondence of the 
time is full of appeals from admirals and complaints of 
the state of their squadrons, and of promises of relief 
on the part of the commissioners, and notices of vessels 
fitting out to carry stores to the fleet in the Straits. 



142 Robert Blake 

The method of supply was uncertain, and at the best of 
times desperately slow. Purchase in the neutral ports 
was not always a quicker method, and was even more 
uncertain. When Penn was left in the Mediterranean 
in 1650, to look after the remains of Rupert's fleet, he 
found the utmost difficulty in keeping his half-dozen 
frigates supplied with provisions during his wanderings 
to and fro. His diaries bristle with entries showing how 
hard he found it to obtain meat, bread, and the beverage 
wine which was served out to the men in place of the 
beer they received in the Channel. Spanish viceroys 
and Italian princes had to be first persuaded to allow the 
purchases to be made. Then syndics and such like 
municipal authorities had to be got to exert themselves 
to make the bakers bake at a reasonable price. Often 
enough the syndics were far from willing to allow, or, 
where they could not prevent it, to encourage this 
sudden increase of demand in the local market, on the 
intelligible ground that it either raised prices for the 
citizens or caused discontent among the tradesmen. 
Occasionally an English admiral had to have recourse 
to threatening language before he could obtain leave to 
buy even the most necessary provisions. When the 
neutral states were unfriendly, or at a distance from 
the cruising ground of the fleet, these difficulties were 
proportionately increased. As a matter of course they 
reached the sailor in the shape of reductions of a quarter 
or half in his rations, for which, he was, however, en- 
titled to be compensated in money. 

As the commercial interests of England in the 
Mediterranean increased, and as her fleets began to 
make it a regular cruising ground, the want of a port 



Chasing the Plate Ships 143 

in wliicli sliips could be repaired, and stores collected, 
began to be acutely felt. In tlie eigliteenth century it 
was supplied by the occupation of Gibraltar and Port 
Mahon ; and when Minorca liad been lost, by Malta. The 
chain of posts has been completed in these times by the 
occupation of Cyprus and Egypt. Tangier had been 
accepted as part of the dower of Catharine of Braganza, 
largely in hope that it would serve the turn ; and long 
before this the need of a dockyard and harbour of refuge 
in or near the Mediterranean had been felt. Some, at 
least, of Elizabeth's officers had seen the evacuation 
of Cadiz with regret ; while Cromwell, with prophetic 
sagacity, fixed on another point of the Spanish coast as 
convenient to be seized and held by England. 

The first period of Blake's cruisings after the Plate 
fleet was barren. In September 1655 he returned to 
England, and saw his native land, and perhaps his 
patrimonial estate in Somerset, for the last time. A 
passing notice of his stay in England is to be found in 
the correspondence of Charles's secretary, Nicholas. The 
Royalist exile reports a story to the effect that Blake 
and Montague had been sent to the Downs to pacify the 
seamen who were half-mutinous because Lawson had 
been removed from his command. As this rumour, for 
that is all it seems to have been, agrees with what is 
known of the Admiral's steady fidelity to Cromwell, it 
may possibly have some truth in it; but the statements 
of Nicholas and the other adherents of Charles at 
Breda are only to be accepted with caution. They 
were exiles — a class of men who are always extremely 
credulous — and they had to rely for information either 
on angry partisans, who would see everything through 



144 Robert Blake 

party spectacles, or on spies, wlio would say just wliat 
seemed to them likely to please tlieir employers. In 
this very letter, Secretary Nicholas states calmly, with 
the air of a well-informed person reporting a notorious 
matter of fact, that ' the discontent among seamen is 
so general that, if they had known they would have 
security in the King of Spain's ports, by his having 
m.ade a fast conjunction with our King, many, nay 
most of the fleet, would have abandoned Cromwell, who 
is said to be most odious among the seamen.' Hopeful 
speculation of this kind is scattered up and down the 
Royalist correspondence in abundance, and may be 
taken for what it is worth as evidence of their beliefs 
and feelings. It contrasts curiously with the steady 
refusal of their partisans to attempt or even recommend 
a landing in face of this same mutinous fleet. Nicholas 
was not the first nor yet the last exile who grounded too 
great confidence on the grumblings of the British sea- 
man. If Charles had made his fast conjunction with 
the King of Spain, he would certainly have found, as 
his brother was destined to do at La Hogue, that the 
loyalty of the sailors did not extend to making them 
miss a chance of beating the foreigner. Spanish ports 
were to be closed to Cromwell's fleet for many months 
to come, but the only one they sailed into was Santa 
Cruz, and on that occasion neither his Catholic Majesty 
nor the son of the late Man profited by their action. 

In March 1656 Blake sailed from Torbay, with 
Montague as his colleague, in command of a fleet of 
forty sail. By this time there was open and general 
war with Spain, so that the admirals went provided 
with instructions of the sink, burn, and destroy kind. 



Chasing the Plate Ships 145 

The ships had not been got ready without trouble. 
Money was hard to come by, and men could only be 
collected slowly and in driblets. 

In the inevitable course of things the importance 
of these obstacles was grossly exaggerated in the loose 
talk of the time. Like other rulers of England, be- 
fore and afterwards, until the increase of the national 
wealth, the foundation of the Bank, and the formation 
of the funded debt, put it in the power of the Treasury 
to command millions at a few days' notice, Cromwell 
had his difficulties in finding money. It does not 
appear that he had more to suffer in this respect than 
Elizabeth, James, and Charles. He was at least never 
reduced to the necessity of asking the Spaniards to 
bribe him to help them against the Dutch, and then 
begging the Dutch to bribe him to betraj?- the Spaniards. 
As for the want of men, that was destined to remain a 
chronic disease. A hundred and sixty years later, when 
all England was loyal enough, Collingwood describes 
his ship's company as a motley crew of many nations. 
He had even once to impress a negro general from San 
Domingo, and turn him into a topman. There was 
another fleet fitting out for the West Indies in 1656; 
and to find crews for both, in face of the competition of 
the merchant ships, was not easy. In spite of increased 
pay and better rations, sailors preferred the freedom of 
the private ships to the strict discipline of the navy. 

The pressgaug was active, and many an exciting 
hunt for men went on all over England. The sailors 
would often take the press money — so far they accepted 
the system favourably enough — and then desert ou 
their way to the dockyards. ' Southwold/ said Major 

L 



146 Robert Blake 

Burton, ' was beset by Colonel Brewster's troop, but tlie 
officers of the town were so base, they could not get a 
man; as fast as our people searched one part of the 
town, they got into the other, although they searched 
with candles.' The dislike of the men for the naval 
discipline, the baseness of magistrates in the seaports, 
mostly themselves merchants and shipowners, and the 
unpopularity of the unhealthy West Indian station, 
made the manning of the fleets to lag. The comple- 
ment of Blake and Montague's fleet was at last made up 
by drafting soldiers on board in the proportion of one 
to five sailors — which is less than the proportion of 
marines to blue-jackets usual in later times. After all, 
they left England better manned than the ' Montague ' 
(74) which, if all tales be true, joined Lord Howe just 
before June 1, with thirteen seamen on board, and a 
boy who had been fifteen months at sea as captain of 
the fore-top. 

The work before these forty ships was ultimately 
the ruin of the Spanish trade and the capture of 
the much-desired Plate ships ; but in the meantime 
a basis of operations had to be secured. The most 
convenient ports for the purpose were the Portuguese, 
and as the Spaniards were still making sporadic at- 
tempts to reconquer Portugal, it ought to have been 
easy enough for the two countries to come to an 
arrangement. But they had a little independent quarrel 
of their own. The King had never yet settled the 
disputes begun when Blake blockaded Eupert in the 
Tagus. He refused to pay the indemnity claimed for 
the merchants whose vessels had been taken by the 
Boyalist cruisers and sold at Lisbon. He would not 



Chasing the Plate Ships 147 

hear of granting religious liberty to English merchants 
resident in his capital. He would not promise to send 
back deserters who professed to have become Catholics. 
These men were in the habit of claiming their pay, and 
were supported by the Portuguese authorities — ' which 
may be a colour for any knave to leave his duty, or for 
the Roman Catholics to seduce our men.' Satisfaction 
on these points had been promised by the Portuguese 
Ambassador in London, but when Mr. Meadows arrived 
at Lisbon to secure the ratification of the treaty, it was, 
in the words of Cromwell's instructions to the Admirals, 
refused ' unless we will agree to submit this article to 
the determination of the Pope,' and this — horrible sug- 
gestion! — amounts to an attempt to 'bring us to an 
owning of the Pope ; which we hope, whatever befall 
us, we shall not, by the grace of God, be brought unto.' 
On the indemnity question the King may have thought 
that the loss of his Brazil fleet in 1650 was satisfaction 
enough. It is strange that the memory of the events 
of that year did not open his eyes to the folly of resist- 
ance to an overwhelming power, but it has never been 
easy to persuade the Portuguese that they are the 
weakest. There is a not unpleasant little fable told by 
their neighbours, the Spaniards, to the effect that a cer- 
tain Portuguese once fell into a dry well, and there broke 
both his legs and an arm. While he was lying in this 
painful state there came by a Spaniard, who looked down 
and asked what was the matter. Upon this the Portu- 
guese replied, ' Castilian, if you will help me out of the 
well I will spare your life.' This was much the frame 
of mind in which the King received Mr. Meadows. 
He was soon brought to his senses. Blake and Mon- 

L 2 



148 Robert Blake 

tague came to support tlie ambassador, and, finding 
things still unsettled, proceeded to carry out their 
instructions, wliich were to seize tlie Brazil fleet in case 
the Portuguese proved obstinate. A squadron was left 
to lie ojff Cadiz and look after the Spaniards. Then the 
bulk of the fleet took up the cruising stations occupied 
by Blake and Popham six years before, and waited for 
the ships coming back from South America. This 
spectacle caused his Most Faithful Majesty to reflect. 
With forty sail of English cruisers stationed along his 
coast, there was no chance that the Brazil fleet could 
escape. It was certain to blunder into the middle of 
them as it had done in 1650. The loss of these ships 
and of their cargoes would have spelt bankruptcy for 
his Government and for the whole trading community 
of Lisbon. When it became clear to him that this 
misfortune was the alternative to accepting Cromwell's 
terms, the King at last yielded. On June 5 the five 
years' wriggling of the Portuguese came to an end. 
The ' Colchester ' went into Lisbon to receive the promised 
indemnity of 50,000^., equal to at least four times as 
much of our money, and from her it was transferred 
into the ' Phoenix ' and ' Sapphire,' and sent to England 
to be divided among the merchants whose ships had 
been taken off the Berlings by Maurice. It was alto- 
gether a very rough, high-handed business on our side 
from first to last. The King may well have asked, 
with the purged members in the Queen's Court, by 
what law he was called upon to refuse to accept Rupert 
as the representative of the legitimate ruler of England, 
or to do things offensive to his religious opinions. To 
which no answer could well have been given except in 



Chasing the Plate Ships 149 

the words of Hugh Peters, ' by the law of Necessity ; 
truly by the Power of the Sword.' With all that, it 
had to be done. It was no longer possible for any 
State to endure the barbarism which still prevailed in 
maritime affairs. Rupert was not a pirate, though the 
Parliament was logically compelled by its position to 
call him one, but the excuses made for receiving him 
were of the kind which might have been used often 
enough to cover much protection of undoubted piracy. 
When was a foreign State to cease to recognise the 
commission of an exiled prince ? By insisting that it 
should not be recognised at all, the Long Parliament 
and Cromwell at least established a precedent which 
on the whole worked for security on the sea — in future 
it would be understood that neglect of the rule meant 
war, and the issues would be clear — a very great gain 
for the cause of peace. A strict application of the 
golden rule to the affairs of nations would perhaps 
condemn interference with the treatment of Protestants 
by the Portuguese Government. It is certain that 
neither the Parliament nor Cromwell would have en- 
dured the meddling of Continental powers with their 
policy towards the Catholics. Still, they were, on the 
whole, advancing the cause of toleration and tacitly 
binding themselves to give the freedom they demanded. 
In helping to bring the Portuguese to submission Blake 
was actively forwarding one of the greatest changes for the 
better made in the seventeenth century, and completing 
the work begun by his cruise in the Mediterranean. 
Hitherto traders had been treated abroad as interlopers, 
to be tolerated in most cases, but still as needing tole- 
ration. They had been, as has been pointed out before. 



150 Robert Blake 

left very mucli to shift for themselves by their own 
Governments. From this time forward a wholly different 
view prevailed. States were often jealous enough in 
their commercial policy, but at least they recognised the 
foreigner's right to do whatever he was not expressly for- 
bidden to do. They also began to act on the principle that 
a civil wrong done by one to the subjects of another was 
not only a fair cause of war, but an insult which the 
Government of the aggrieved side could not tolerate 
without dishonour. All the teaching of all the moralists 
in the world has not done so much to secure fair treat- 
ment for residents in foreign countries. When Govern- 
ments had to choose between treating one another's 
subjects decently, or fighting, they would prefer the 
first course in the absence of some independent motive 
for declaring war. 

As between England and Portugal themselves, the 
result of this vigorous policy was a firm alliance. The 
events of 1650 and 1656 showed the Court of Lisbon 
how completely it was at the mercy of the stronger 
power. At the same time it learnt that the manifest 
interest of the English was to have the secure use of 
Portuguese ports. Between weakness on one side and 
interest on the other was made the alliance which was 
strengthened by Charles the Second's marriage, confirmed 
by the Methuen treaty, fostered by the drinking of much 
port, and lasted long enough to give the British armies 
a battle-field in the great struggle with Napoleon. The 
immediate consequences of the King's surrender were 
to give Blake the use of Lagos Bay to careen and water- 
his ships in. 



iSi 



CHAPTER X. 

THE CAPTURE OF THE PLATE SHIPS. 

The winding up of the five years' quarrel with Portugal 
had overlapped the beginning of the operations against 
Spain. Blake and Montague appear to have proceeded 
straight from Torbay to Cadiz, and then leaving Stayner 
with a blockading squadron behind them, to have re- 
turned to the mouth of the Tagus to support the diplo- 
macy of Mr. Meadows. As soon as the ' Sapphire ' 
and the ' Phoenix ' were on their way to England with 
the 50,000L, they returned to the main object of their 
expedition. As the Bay of Biscay seems to have been 
included in their station, there was plenty for the forty 
ships under their command to do. The Basque priva- 
teers were nearly the only efficient naval force the King 
of Spain had at his disposal. As soon as the war 
became general they had begun capturing English 
merchant ships, and a force had to be despatched from 
before Lisbon to cut out one of them which had taken 
a prize into Vigo Bay. As some too speculative and 
slightly credulous persons in our time have had occasion 
to know, Vigo Bay was the scene of not the least re- 
markable incident in the history of English hunting of 
Spanish treasure, but in this war nothing very famous 
was done in its waters. 



152 Robert Blake 

It was six weary montlis before anything effectual 
was done in tlie neighbourhood of Cadiz itself The 
blockade began with a disappointment. Our fleet ar- 
rived too late to capture four Spanish galleons coming 
from the West Indies, and they had the further vexa- 
tion of learning that twenty-eight sail, three of which 
were men-of-war, had left for America in safety. 
^ When we left England,' writes Ths. Pointer of the 
' Speaker,' ' we expected to do great things ; and should 
have done but for slackness and false intelligence.' By 
slackness Mr. Pointer probably meant the delay in 
fitting the ships for sea, but on the whole the Ad- 
mirals do not seem to have suffered much from want of 
intelligence, considering how difficult it must have been 
for them to learn what the Spaniards were doing. 
Little was to be learnt through Portugal, and even less 
from chance neutrals who might be met at sea. Per- 
haps they used the resource recommended by Sir 
William Monson. This officer, who was in the first and 
the last fights of the Elizabethan war with Spain, has 
explained how the English captains contrived to obtain 
such good information as they did about the movements 
of the Spanish ships. During the whole of those years 
of avowed war (it must not be forgotten that the ex- 
peditions of Drake and Hawkins were conducted in 
time of peace), the trade between Spain and England 
was carried on by Scotch vessels, or by English vessels 
under the Scotch flag. These craft visited the islands, 
the southern ports of Spain, and Sallee, which had a 
steady intercourse with Seville, in great numbers. 
When the existence of this neutral or illicit traffic is 
remembered, the ruse recommended by Sir William will 



The Capture of the Plate Ships 153 

suggest itself at once. He sent small craft under the 
Scotcli flag into the Spanish ports, or what was safer 
and quite as effectual, he put one of his own officers 
into a Scottish ship. The Leith or Aberdeen skipper 
who happened to be in those waters would always be 
open to a pecuniary arrangement, and with the English 
smuggler who was flying the St. Andrew's cross there 
could be no difficulty. An agent was even kept per- 
manently at Sallee to send regular reports of all that 
was being done or planned at Seville. After Dunbar 
there was no St. Andrew's cross flying on the sea, and 
Blake must have been so far hampered ; but with Sallee 
he had relations of the usual kind which prevailed with 
the piratical Barbary States. He negotiated with its 
rulers, fought with its cruisers, and protected trade 
with its merchants. Tangier, still in the possession of 
Portugal, was open to his ships, and regularly used 
as a watering place. Between the two he may well 
have learnt whatever was to be learnt about the move- 
ments of the Spaniards. 

For the rest, there was little enough to be discovered 
which his own look-out men could not have seen from 
the masthead across the narrow spit of land which con- 
nects the rocky peninsula of Cadiz with the Isla de 
Leon. The Spaniards had unrigged their galleons, and 
laid them up in the inner harbour, or dragged them 
into the Oarraca. There they were to be seen un- 
rigged, unarmed, unmanned, rotting ignobly. Like 
Napoleon a hundred and sixty years later, the autho- 
rities at Madrid had decided to see whether a blockade 
would not wear the English fleet out. In their case 
the calculation was better grounded than his, for in the 



154 Robert Blake 

seventeentli century the use of copper to sheath the 
hulls of ships had not been discovered, and a very- 
moderate term of cruising covered their bottoms with 
barnacles, which destroyed their sailing power. They 
had to return continually to port to be scraped. Deli- 
berate calculation may have had very little to do with 
the idleness of the Spanish fleet. It can be adequately 
accounted for by the penury of the Government. The 
miserable poverty of the masters of boundless gold and 
silver had reached such a point that in the previous year 
the galleons had only been equipped by the voluntary 
contributions of the merchants of Seville. In 1656 
the Spanish Government was on the verge of the act 
of bankruptcy which completed its financial ruin. By 
necessity, as much as by choice, it decided to play the 
waiting game. The garrisons of the seaports were 
strengthened — it was easier to press soldiers who were 
hardly fed, scarcely dressed, and never paid, than to 
equip galleons; something was done to improve the 
fortifications, and then the Court of Philip IV. waited 
to see whether wind, and waves, and barnacles would 
not rid it of the English fleet. 

The barnacles did not stick tighter to the bottoms 
of Blake's ships than his squadron to the mouth of 
Cadiz harbour. For months the English ships stood 
in daily, reconnoitred the outer harbour, stood out at 
night to a safe distance, and lay to till daylight. With 
the early morning there came a certain amount of 
diversion, at least during the early times of the blockade. 
When the bulk of the Spanish ships had been dis- 
armed and laid up, three galleys were still kept in 
commission, possibly because the alcalde and the cor- 



The Capture of the Plate Ships 155 

regidor did not know what else to do with the slaves. 
Every calm night these three poor representatives of a 
great navy slipped out of port to see if they could not 
find one of the blockading fleet to worry, and every 
morning, when the sea was smooth, they pegged away 
at one or another of the English ships with the big gun 
they carried in their sharp ugly snouts. A hundred 
and fifty years later, when Collingwood was engaged in 
the same work as Blake, he was annoyed in a similar 
fashion. Under favourable circumstances the galleys 
were not altogether contemptible enemies. They were 
long low craft, rowed by hundreds of slaves. One 
heavy gun mounted in the bows formed their whole 
armament. When a dead calm kept the line-of-battle 
ships idle, they could creep round to the stern of any 
one which was isolated, take up a position out of reach 
of the guns of the others, and fire into their big enemy, 
who was as nearly as might be helpless. But at best 
they could do little more than fret the blockading fleet. 
They were compelled to keep their road home open, for 
the slightest pufi" of wind which could fill the sails of 
the line-of-battle ships would bring the galleys under 
the fire of broadsides, and then there was nothing for 
it but to show a clean pair of heels. The fight was too 
unequal between one gun in the bows and forty in the 
side, and between vessels purposely built as light as 
possible, and great ships constructed to stand the 
roughest usage of storm and battle. The galleys had 
learnt their weakness before the end of the sixteenth 
century. Francis Drake had given them a memorable 
lesson in Cadiz Bay itself, when he was about singeing 
the King of Spain's beard. In 1590 twelve of them 



156 Robert Blake 

had come to sad grief in an attack on ten merchant 
ships belonging to the Levant Company. The galleys 
of the King, commanded by John Andrew Doria, a 
grandson of Charles Y.'s famous admiral, were com- 
pletely beaten by the English traders who scarcely 
suffered at all in the fight. During six hours their fire 
swept the decks and pierced the hulls of the galleys, till 
Doria had enough, and fled into port at the best speed 
his surviving slaves — for the broadsides must have made 
a dreadful butchery among the closely packed banks — 
could be flogged into giving his damaged vessels. After 
this the galleys never ventured to attack sailing ships 
except in a calm. In 1656 they hardly did even all 
they could. Their commanders were heartily afraid of 
Blake's broadsides, and kept at such a respectful dis- 
tance that these encounters led to nothing but waste of 
powder and shot. It may have been some consolation 
to the Spaniards to see their flag flying at all on the 
smooth blue water outside of Cadiz, and the sound of 
the guns may have provided the people of the town 
with emotions, but for the English it must have been 
tepid fun to throw away good ammunition on such 
feeble and cowardly enemies. The worst of it was that 
the galleys, despicable as they were at sea, made it 
impossible for the English boats to try any enterprise 
in the harbour. Launches and cutters would have 
been run down by them easily enough. 

"With nothing to be done for the moment but wait, 
the English fleet could spend its leisure in making plans 
for the capture of Spanish ports and speculating on the 
advantages to be got by seizing one. The letters of 
Pointer of the ' Speaker ' prove that the officers were of 



The Capture of the Plate Ships 157 

opinion that Cadiz witli its unrigged fleet was a prize 
worth the employment of six or even ten thousand 
soldiers. Cromwell was not without hopes of seeing it 
taken by the ships alone. As early as April he wrote to 
the Admirals, inquiring ' Whether now it might not be 
worthy to be weighed by you, and your council of war, 
whether this fleet of theirs [i.e. the Spaniards] might 
not be burnt or otherwise destroyed ? Whether Puntal 
and the forts are so considerably stronger as to dis- 
courage from such an attempt ? Whether Cadiz itself 
be unattemptable ; or the island on which it stands be 
noways to be separated from relieving the town by the 
bridge, the island being so narrow in some parts of it ? 
Whether any other place be attemptable ; especially 
that of the town and castle of Gibraltar, — which if 
possessed and made tenable by us, would it not be both 
an advantage to our trade and an annoyance to the 
Spaniard; and enable us without keeping so great a 
fleet on that coast, with six nimble frigates lodged there 
to do the Spaniard more harm than by a fleet, and ease 
our own charges ? ' 

Unfortunately Cromwell was, in his own words, ' dis- 
coursing probabilities' too soon, though in a highly 
sagacious fashion. Cadiz might have been isolated from 
the Isla de Leon with ease, which is what is meant by 
the wrongheaded phrase about separating the island 
from relieving the town by the bridge, as Mr. Carlyle, 
reading with second sight, explains. It stands on the 
bowl of a spoon with a long narrow handle. To land 
on the handle, and so isolate the bowl, would have been 
easy enough for a body of troops, but it was useless 
to try it with sailors alone. For the same reason, 



158 Robert Blake 

Cromwell's prophetic suggestion as to Gibraltar could 
not be acted on. Montague, who answered this letter for 
himself and his colleague, pointed out that with six 
thousand men either place could be taken with no great 
difficulty. It would not be necessary to besiege them 
in form, for the Spaniards notoriously never victualled a 
town for more than a month, and any force which could 
hold its ground for that time would have been sure of 
getting them by starvation. In the state of feebleness 
to which Spain had sunk, six thousand men would have 
been amply sufficient to occupy the neck of the pen- 
insulas on which both Cadiz and Gibraltar stand. The 
fleet would have answered for preventing relief by sea ; 
but without soldiers it was useless to attempt the enter- 
prise. The events of the war of the Spanish Succession 
amply justified the caution of the Admirals. Even then, 
when Spain was still feebler than in 1656, Ormond's 
attempt to rush Cadiz was repulsed by Villadarias and 
his ^ rascally foot militia.' Eooke had a strong body of 
soldiers with him when he surprised Gibraltar; and 
better still, he caught the whole Spanish garrison hearing 
mass outside the walls when his men scrambled up the 
Kock. 

When it became clear that nothing could be done 
against the towns without more soldiers than could 
then be spared, and that the Spaniards were not coming 
to sea, it was decided in England to recall part of the 
fleet. Ten ships seem to have gone back in summer, 
and in August Cromwell ordered Montague home to 
consult, and Blake to remain with twenty ships on the 
coast. A certain margin of discretion was left to the 
Admirals. They were authorised to modify their orders 



The Capture of the Plate Ships 159 

if they saw a cliance of doing any stroke of service 
immediately ; but Cromwell made his own wishes per- 
fectly clear, and Montague at least was hardly likely to 
go out of his way to find reasons for not complying 
with them. Just as the time came for him to return to 
England, a turn in the long ill-luck of the fleet enabled 
the Admirals to combine a piece of effective service 
with punctual obedience to Cromwell's orders. In 
September the Plate ships turned up at last. 

Whether through want of information, or by the 
rashness of their commander, or because the Court at 
Madrid was in such desperate want of money that they 
must needs run all hazards to supply it, or because they 
' hoped their European coasts to find cleared from our 
ships by the autumnal wind,' eight of these galleons, 
with their priceless cargoes, came on from Santa Cruz. 
Even now they nearly slipped through the fingers of 
the blockading squadron. There is no better hiding 
place than the sea. In the finest weather a few miles of 
distance will conceal fleets from one another completely, 
and when there is a haze over the water, they may pass 
within hearing distance and never know it. It is one 
of the dramatic incidents of the great French Eevolution- 
ary wars, that Nelson crossed the track of Napoleon's 
fleet on its way to Egypt in the middle watch of one 
hazy night. He was so close to his chance of ^ catching 
Boney on a wind ' that the sound of the bells struck 
as fog signals on his ships was heard by the French- 
men. They went on their way in nervous quiet, and by 
sunrise the fleets were out of sight of one another. The 
hard fate of the galleons was made harder by the fact 
that they had nearly been as fortunate as the squadron 



i6o Robert Blake 

and convoy of Admiral Brueys. On the night of Sep- 
tember 8 they passed safely through the English fleet 
which would be stretched across the Straits. The reports 
of the action are as usual meagre and contradictory. 
According to one story, the Spaniards were chased by 
Stayner during the night, and attacked next morning. 
According to another, they were only sighted at day- 
break, and might have escaped altogether if the flagship 
had not fired a salute when in sight of San Lucar, and 
so attracted attention. 

This later version, which Waller may well have heard 
from Montague, is the more probable of the two. The 
galleons would naturally do what had been done formerly 
under the same circumstances. They would hug the 
north-east coast of Africa, which is often hazy, and is 
sometimes visited by fogs as dense as those of Newfound- 
land. Under the cover of this friendly shelter, they 
could get between the English ships and the shore of 
Morocco, reach the mouth of the Straits unseen, and 
then stand over to Cadiz. With this help or without, 
the eight treasure-ships arrived within sight of San 
Lucar de Barrameda unstopped. Their own coast was 
before them, a safe port at hand, and no English to be 
seen. Cadiz was only a few miles to the south-east, and 
right in front of them was the entrance to the G uadal- 
quivir, the river of Seville. They might well think that 
the dangers of their long voyage were over, and fire a 
feu de joie. But at that very moment their fate came 
upon them. Stayner was in the immediate neighbour- 
hood with his own ship the ' Speaker,' and the ' Bridge- 
water ' and ' Plymouth ' frigates. He either sighted the 
Spaniards or heard their salute, and bore down at once. 



The Capture of the Plate Ships i6i 

The engagement wliicli followed was possibly one of 
those which Captain Lemuel Gulliver told to the King 
of Brobdingnag, and it was certainly marked by inci- 
dents calculated to help that humane monarch to make 
up his mind as to the merits of the ' most pernicious race 
of little odious vermin.' As a fight it was one-sided 
from the beginning. Stayner's three ships attacked the 
galleons furiously, apparently with quite as much wish 
to destroy as to capture. Outnumbered as they were 
by more than two to one, they routed their enemy with 
a very trifling loss. The Spaniards seem to have stuck 
to their guns pluckily, but want of discipline, bad 
gunnery, and perhaps the fact that their decks were 
hampered with cargo, left them at the mercy of their 
expert, alert, and hungry assailants. In a few hours 
most of the eight galleons had been sunk, burnt, taken, 
or driven on shore. Only two, or even only one, if all 
tales be true, escaped either into San Lucar or Puerto de 
Santa Maria, for they can hardly have got into Cadiz. 
The fate of the Capitana, as the Spaniards call the 
flagship, was especially cruel. She carried the Marquis 
of Badajos, who had been Viceroy of Mexico, and was 
returning home in command of the treasure fleet. The 
marquis had his family on board, and all the property 
he possessed in the world, for his family was one of 
the poorest among the Spanish nobility. When the 
' Speaker ' ranged up alongside him, the Spaniard 
fought his ship stoutly, but with no more success than 
his captains. In a short time the Capitana was on 
fire. It is to the honour of the unfortunate man that 
his enemies believed he fired her himself, to disappoint 
the English of their prize. He had probably no need 

M 



1 62 Robert Blake 

to commit this act of desperation, for the fire was only 
too likely to break out in a ship full of inflammable 
cargo, manned by seamen so careless as the Spaniards 
have always been, and particularly at a time when it 
was still the custom to bring gunpowder barrels on to 
the deck, and serve the powder out with a ladle. When 
the disaster had happened, the marquis did at least 
set an example not unbecoming a grandee of Spain. 
He refused to leave his ship, and remained to perish in 
her with his wife. Before the flames had gained the 
cabins, he threw his children into the water, in hope 
that they might cling to spars till picked up by the 
English boats. It is satisfactory to know that some of 
them were saved, and were treated with humanity by 
the captors. He himself met the horrible death he 
faced so manfully. Exactly sixteen years later, one of 
the English officers who helped to bring the Marquis 
of Badajos to his death, was man enough to follow his 
example. In 1672, during the disgraceful Dutch war, 
Montague, then Earl of Sandwich, was left alone on 
board his blazing flagship in Solebay, and he, too, chose 
to die where he was rather than desert his post. 

The marquis could do no more than be beaten with 
honour. About one-half of his convoy fell into Stayner's 
hands, and the captured galleons rewarded the English 
fleet for the weariness of the long blockade. They were 
a magnificent prize. Over and above the goods on 
board, which must have been of great value, no less a 
sum than 600,000Z. was found in actual bullion. It was 
in coin and ingots of silver ' like sugar loaves ' in shape. 
Montague himself had the pleasing task of carrying it 
home to Portsmouth, where it was loaded in waggons 



The Capture of the Plate Ships 163 

and carried up to London. A guard of ten soldiers 
conducted the booty tlirougli the streets of Southwark 
to the Tower, where it was deposited till the Mint could 
turn it into coin. The silver does not seem to have 
reached England exactly as it was taken, for Montague 
himself had to report that there had been ' some mis- 
carriages by the ships which did take the ships of 
Spain.' In plain English, some of the sailors had been 
drawing their share of prize-money in advance, not 
altogether without excuse, since the Government of the 
Protectorate, in its great need of money, was only too 
likely to follow the example set on a similar occasion by 
Elizabeth, and deal but indifferently with the captors 
of the welcome bullion. Their pilferings, as far as they 
did actually pilfer, cannot have been of any great impor- 
tance. The bulk of the silver found its way to the 
Tower, and there were no such charges made against 
the Admirals as were brought on only too solid evidence 
against Montague in the second Dutch war. In 
England he was received with the honours and praise 
to which he had no better right than Blake, and much 
less right than Stayner. He was thanked by the 
House and praised by Waller, who does not even name 
Blake or Stayner. 

With these returns victorious Montagu, 
With laurels in his hand, and half Peru. 
Let the brave generals divide that bough, 
Our great Protector hath such wreaths enow, 
His conquering head has no more room for bays. 
Then let it be as the glad nation prays. 
Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down, 
And the State fixed by making him a crown, 

M 2 



164 Robert Blake 

With ermine clad and purple, let him hold 
A royal sceptre, made of Spanish gold. 

Neither the Spanish gold nor the men who took it 
could fix the State in that way, but they did it very 
essential service. Six hundred thousand pounds was 
equal to at least one fourth of the yearly revenue of the 
Protectorate, and to get possession of that sum at once 
and in a lump, was a very sensible relief to its finances 
even when the prize-money due to the sailors had been 
deducted. 



i65 



CHAPTER XI. 

SANTA CRUZ DE TENEEIFE. 

The last year of Blake's life was spent in a blockade of 
Cadiz, broken by a swift cruise to tlie soutk-west, and 
one day of battle. On April 20 ke made kis attack on 
tke Spaniards at Santa Cruz, and tken returned to kis 
cruising ground to wait for leave to come kome. Tkese 
twelve montks were tke most important to kis fame in 
all kis fourteen years of service by sea and land, for kis 
last figkt was also kis greatest. If ke kad died in tke 
beginning of 1656, ke would still kave left a reputation 
as a warrior second only to Cromwell's, but ke would 
not kave taken kis place as tke mosb intrepid and 
original ckief wko ever kandled an Englisk fleet till Sir 
Edward Hawke took kis squadron into tke rocks on tke 
coast of Brittany. Tke defence of Taunton, tke battles 
witk Tromp and De Ruyter, tke destruction of tke 
pirate skips at Porto Farina, were great feats, but none 
of tkem so excited tke admiration of kis contemporaries, 
or kave been so vividly remembered, as »tke attack on 
tke Spaniards under tke Peak of Tenerife. Even now, 
wken tke battles of tke Nile and of Copenkagen are 
tkere to be compared witk it, tke action of Santa Cruz 
seems to deserve tke almost kyperbolical language of 
Clarendon. 

Blake was at all times most daring wken ke was 



1 66 Robert Blake 

alone in command. He liad had no colleague when lie 
engaged a Dutch fleet twice as strong as his own off 
Dungeness, nor when he sailed into Tunis. He was 
unhampered again when news reached him off Cadiz 
that a fleet of sixteen treasure-ships had put into Santa 
Cruz, and were waiting in that place of supposed safety 
for a chance to run over to the coast of Spain. The 
Spanish governor and admiral were fully justified by 
their experience of naval war as it had been hitherto 
conducted, in believing that their charge was in absolute 
safety under the guns of their fortifications. Santa 
Cruz is a deep and narrow-mouthed bay. Forts had 
been built on both sides of the entrance and at several 
points of the shore. They were armed with the heaviest 
ordnance then in use, placed so as to bring a converging 
fire to bear on any squadron attempting to enter. With 
a fleet in the harbour, these could be reinforced by the 
ships' guns. It was small blame to the Spaniards if 
they thought that no man in his senses would expose 
his ships to such a fire as they could pour on any 
assailants. But the forts, guns, and ships were not the 
only defence of Santa Cruz. Before they could be 
attacked there was a natural obstacle to be overcome. 
' The approach by sea to the anchoring place,' the words 
are Nelson's, ' is under very high land, passing three 
valleys ; therefore the wind is either in from the sea, or 
squally with calms from the mountains.' A fleet de- 
signing to attack the anchorage must face the risk of 
finding itself becalmed within range of the guns of the 
forts. Even if the sea breeze took it in, there was always 
a danger that retreat would be impossible. The Spaniards 
had therefore good ground for trusting not only to their 



Santa Cruz de Tenerife 167 

strength but to the difficulty of getting at them, as 
sufficient defences against any enterprise on the part of 
the English fleet. Only a very modest estimate of their 
own gunnery could have caused them to feel the slightest 
doubt as to the consequences of an attack, and so much 
diffidence was not to be expected from your Don, a 
person notoriously ' altogether unparalleled in his own 
conceit.' The governor, Don Diego Diagues, is said to 
have been warned by some Dutch traders in the harbour 
that an attack would be made, and to have laughed at 
the warning, telling them to take themselves off if they 
were afraid. The Hollanders, who knew the intrepid 
character of Blake, were prudent enough to weigh and 
stand to sea before the English fleet sailed in. The tale 
has all the look of an embellishment invented to adorn 
the victory and give point to the daring of the adventure, 
but if the remonstrance was uttered, it would naturally 
be treated pretty much in this way. 

The Spanish governor did find that Blake was mad 
enough to attack him. As is usually the case with the 
successfully daring operations of war, there was a large 
element of calculation in the Admiral's apparent rash- 
ness. Nelson, who taught by example as well as by 
precept, was in the habit of saying that a sailor was 
never brave enough unless he was half-mad, but then, 
* he understood that there was to be method in the mad- 
ness. No man ever estimated all the chances for or 
against success in any enterprise more carefully than 
Nelson himself, and what he called by the violent name 
of semi-insanity was that rapidity of execution which 
is the best of all kinds of secrecy, ^ like the motion of a 
bullet in the air which flieth so swift as it outruns the 



1 68 Robert Blake 

eye.' Blake did not tell the secrets of his craft to the 
world, like his great successor, but he must have calcu- 
lated as every great captain has done. Looked at by a 
man who could judge coolly, and was not to be fright- 
ened by a brag countenance, the position of the Spaniards 
was much less strong than they imagined. Their fleet 
was anchored in two divisions. Ten small ships had 
been drawn close to the shore in a half-circle. Outside of 
them, and anchored with their broadsides to the sea, 
were the six great galleons. A glance must have shown 
Blake that by this arrangement the Spaniards had in 
fact masked the batteries at the bottom of the Bay and 
the fire of the smaller ships. They could not use their 
guns without firing into their own countrymen. When 
the English were once in the Bay, the fight would be 
with the six galleons mainly, and Stayner's action off 
San Lucar de Barrameda had shown how easily they 
could be mastered when resolutely tackled. The closer 
home the attack was pushed, the fewer would be the 
number of guns the Spaniards could use. It would be 
necessary to run the gauntlet of the castles at the 
mouth of the bay, but with regard to them also the 
closest place was the safest. When once the English 
fleet was in, the guns of the forts which pointed sea- 
ward would be harmless. What was needed to make 
the attack possible was a combination of a good sea 
breeze with a flowing tide, and then the fleet could 
sweep in and do its work of destruction, trusting to 
the efficiency of its cannonade to beat down the fire of 
the castles before the ebb came to float it out. Blake 
must also have calculated, as he was well entitled to do, 
on the bad gunnery of the Spaniards. 



Santa Cruz de Tenerife 169 

Wind and tide suited on the morning of April 20, 
wlien Blake readied tlie Bay and stood in at once under 
a press of canvas. Tlie van division, was led by Stayner, 
wlio liad orders to attack the galleons while Blake him- 
self directed the attack on the castles. The order of 
battle is not known, but the English ships must have 
entered the Bay in line, and taken up their positions 
with the utmost precision. Stayner's squadron must 
have come to the wind to bring themselves broadside 
to broadside with the galleons, and have then anchored 
by the head and stern to keep themselves steady. The 
supporting ships would anchor by the stern opposite 
the batteries, so as to cover the van and protect it from 
a raking fire. During four hours the battle raged 
chiefly with the galleons. On board the smaller ships 
and in many of the batteries, the Spanish gunners must 
have stood idle, watching the battle in the middle of the 
harbour as well as the clouds of smoke rolled on shore 
by the sea breeze would allow them. The unmasked 
batteries were swept by the fire of Blake's gunners. 
When the smoke lifted, it was because the six galleons 
had struck one after another. Then the English crews 
boarded and drove the Spaniards out, to swim on shore 
or drown on the way. For the moment this success 
only increased the danger of Blake's position. The 
Spaniards could now use all their guns with the 
certainty that they could only hit an enemy. The 
galleons would still screen the English ships, but the 
prize crews must have suffered heavily. It was found 
impossible to bring out the captured treasure-ships. 
Even if their sails were not unbent, as is very possible, 
and men enough could have been spared to get them 



I/O RoB'ERT Blake 

under weigh, wMcli is barely credible, it would have 
been impossible to tack them out of the crowded Bay 
against the sea breeze. Orders were given to fire them. 
When the flames had caught, the English, in the con- 
fidence of their proved superiority, fell on the small 
ships anchored under the forts, and fired them also. 
By this time the tide had begun to turn, and our fleet 
drifted out, leaving the sixteen galleons and pataches 
blazing in a great semicircle between them and the 
batteries. At this moment, Heaven, as they believed, 
showed its favour for the servants of God who had 
turned the harbour of Antichrist into a pandemonium, 
and so dreadfully humbled his pride. The wind, which 
had blown steadily into the Bay up to that moment, 
veered round when the fight was over, and began to 
blow equally steadily off* the land. It was not squally 
with calms, from the mountains, but a strong even 
breeze before which the English fleet regained its 
station off" Cadiz with ease. Blake's ships had shattered 
the forts, sunk the ships, and got free of the harbour 
before the wind turned, but its opportuneness and the 
trifling price paid for the victory went to make up the 
marvellous character of the fight. Their total loss in 
killed and wounded had been less than two hundred 
men. The loss of the Spaniards is said to have been 
frightful, and it is easy to believe that it was. 

Since Gustavus Adolphus had routed Tilly at 
Breitenfeld, no battle had so startled the world as this. 
It was a revelation of what mighty things could be 
done by a well-handled fleet. Clarendon, who had to 
write much of brave men and brave fights, speaks of 
none of them as he does of the attack on Santa Cruz. 



Santa Cruz de Ienerife 171 

' The whole action was so miraculous, that all men who 
knew the place, wondered that any sober men, with 
what courage soever endued, would ever have under- 
taken it ; and they could hardly persuade themselves to 
believe what they had done, whilst the Spaniards com- 
forted themselves with the belief that they were devils 
and not men who had destroyed them in such a manner. 
So much a strong resolution of bold and courageous men 
can bring to pass, that no resistance and advantage of 
ground can disappoint them.' The fact that the victory 
was due largely to judicious calculation, and was mate- 
rially helped by a lucky change of wind, does not in 
any way detract from the credit due to the victors for 
their mere courage. To be able to estimate the chances 
against him accurately, and to detect his enemy's weak 
spot, is the best proof the fighting man can give of his 
bravery, for it shows that no danger disturbs his think- 
ing faculty. He ranks as a captain by the use he 
makes of his head, and in very many cases that has 
been to show that things formerly thought too dange- 
rous to be risked, are much less perilous than they 
look. The attack on Santa Cruz was not the miraculous 
feat it seemed to people who considered only the mate- 
rial means at the disposal of the Spaniards. On the 
contrary, it was, as Blake proved, a very feasible piece 
of work indeed, when properly tried ; but then a timid 
commander, or one who was bound by routine, would 
have reasoned like the rest of the world. He would 
have looked at the many guns of the Spaniards, and 
their strong position, and have left them alone. The 
best proof Blake gave in the course of his life that he 
was a great captain was his sagacity in judging that the 



172 Robert Blake 

one lialf of the Spaniard's force would get in the way of 
the other in resisting an attack. He showed the strong 
resolution of a bold and courageous man by acting on 
his own opinion. A very exacting critic might point 
out that the victory was gained over an enemy far less 
courageous and skilful at their work than Blake's fleet, 
and that if the sixteen treasure-ships had been manned 
by Dutchmen commanded by Tromp, and the forts had 
been held by the soldiers of Maurice of Nassau, Blake 
might have sailed into the Bay, but would never have 
gone out. The critic would probably be right, but a 
victory is not the less a victory, nor the less glorious 
and pleasant to remember, because it proves the great 
superiority of the victors in strength of moral fibre. 
Wellington manoeuvred in one way before the Mahrattas, 
and in another against Massena, and yet Assaye was a 
glorious victory. The great leader by sea or land is 
just the man who adapts his means to his work, and 
makes the very utmost of his tools. 

England, and Oliver who spoke for England, did not 
measure their praise to Blake. In June the Protector 
sent him ' a small jewel ' of the value of 500?., ' as a 
testimony of our own and the Parliament's good accept- 
ance of your carriage in this action,' and with it a letter 
lauding his wisdom and conduct in the pious style of the 
time. In the country at large, then and since, this 
battle put Blake entirely apart among the officers of 
the Commonwealth. The others were always men of a 
party. Their valour and skill were devoted to a cause 
which was never accepted by the whole nation. Even 
the officers who commanded the English contingent at 
the battle of the Dunes were no exception, for to say 



Santa Cruz de Tenerife ,173 

nothing of the fact that they met their own countrymen 
in the Spanish ranks, none of them left any great 
personal reputation. But all Englishmen, whether 
Royalist, Republican, or Oromwellian, could be proud 
of Santa Cruz. Hostility to Spain, both as the most 
bigoted of the Catholic powers, and as the nation which 
kept guard over the wealth of America, was an hereditary 
feeling. Whoever struck at the Spaniard struck at the 
enemy of England. When Blake gave him the greatest 
blow he had received since 'the capture of Cadiz, okl 
Cavaliers who had charged under Rupert were as .well 
pleased as the Puritans who had stood by the Aclmiral 
on the walls of Taunton. They accepted the victor oi" 
Santa Cruz as the true successor of Drake and of 
Raleigh, and were content to forget in what service 
he had fought his way to the command of the 
fleet. 

The temptation to compare this brilliant piece of 
fighting with the disastrous ajffair of 1797 is strong, and 
particularly for a biographer of Blake, since Nelson has 
himself invited comparison by a somewhat disparaging 
reference to his predecessor. In point of fact, however, 
there is very little similarity between the two actions. 
When Nelson made the desperate night attack which 
failed so utterly, and which cost him his right arm, he 
had quite other work to do than Blake. His orders 
were to capture the treasure which had been landed, and 
to do that he must needs get possession of the town. 
Blake's object was the destruction of the ships in the 
harbour, and he had no occasion to meddle with Santa 
Cruz itself, beyond bombarding the forts. It is even 
hardly fair to make a comparison between the conduct 



174 Robert Blake 

of the leaders, since Nelson was carrying out the orders 
of Earl St. Vincent, and could only do Ms best with 
the means given him. His fault, as far as there was 
any, consisted in this, that he had tried a work so 
difficult as to be nearly impossible, with a readiness 
which more than bordered on temerity. Given that the 
attempt had to be made, his plan was probably as good 
as it could be. If so many of his boats had not been 
shattered in the surf, if one detachment of his flotilla had 
not missed the Mole in the dark, if he had not been 
disabled by a wound early in the action, if the Spaniards 
had been taken by surprise, and if they had shown 
much less than their usual courage in defending their 
towns, Santa Cruz might have been taken. The defect 
of the scheme, the inevitable defect, was that it depended 
for success on so many ' ifs.' Blake's plan of battle needed 
only good seamanship and good gunnery to make it 
successful, and the turn of the wind at the end was 
only a little favour of fortune, grateful but not indis- 
pensable. 

From Santa Cruz Blake returned to Cadiz, and 
remained there till he received leave to come home. 
His fighting was over, and his service was drawing to 
a close with his life. Between the end of April and 
the beginning of August he had some accounts to settle 
with the pirates of Sallee, but this was only a continuation 
of former work. There was the usual interchange of 
threats and promises. Little could be done against a 
port too shallow to admit large ships, and an enemy 
who did not even pretend to fight, but only lurked 
about in search of unarmed merchant vessels. The 
pirates made the promises they never failed to lavish 



I 



Santa Cruz de T en e rife 175 

when in danger and break whenever they thought they 
could do it with safety. 

During the summer months Blake's health grew 
rapidly so bad that he became incapable of doing the work 
of his squadron. His constitution had probably been 
weakened by the wound he received in the battle of Port- 
land. When he landed at Walderswick after the battle 
of June 1653, he was suffering from the gravel. Since 
then he had been in constant sea service, and when 
he sailed to the Canaries he had already been for one 
whole year on board, probably without landing at all. 
The inevitable consequences were beginning to appear. 
Atthat time, and for generations after, scurvy was rarely 
absent from ships engaged in long sea voyages. The 
treaty with Portugal made it possible for blockading 
ships to obtain fresh meat and fruit, but even with 
this occasional relief the health of the fleet was bad. 
Confinement, want of exercise, and want of wholesome 
food, acting on a constitution weakened by wounds and 
disease, did their work. When, in August 1657, Blake 
at last received orders to bring home the ships which 
could not be subjected to the strain of another winter's 
blockade, he had been attacked by some form of scorbu- 
tic disease. To him as to Collingwood, the permission 
to revisit his native land came too late. The battered 
•' George ' which carried his flag had barely entered the 
Channel before Blake knew that he should never see 
his house at Bridgewater again. Nothing is known of 
his death-bed beyond the fact that he expressed the 
wish to live long enough to reach the shore, and have 
some space left him in which to settle his estate. He died 
just two hours before the ' George,' with her consorts 



176 Robert Blake 

the ' Newbury ' and the ' Colcliester/ cast anclior in 
Plymoutli Sound. 

The Government he had so well served showed his 
memory all due honour. ' He wanted,' in the character- 
istic words of Clarendon, ' no pomp of funeral when he 
was dead, Cromwell causing him to be brought up by 
land to London in all the state that could be ; and to 
encourage his officers to venture their lives, that they 
might be pompously buried, he was, with all the 
solemnity possible and at the charge of the public, in- 
terr'd in Harry the Seventh's Chapel, among the monu- 
ments of the Kings.' It was necessary for the Royalist 
historian to find some more or less mean motive for 
every action of Cromwell's, and to attribute whatever 
was done in England to him alone. In truth, however, 
there was nothing exceptional in the funeral honours 
paid Blake, hardly even the place of his sepulchre. 
The ceremonies used were carefully copied from those 
employed at the funeral of Deane who was slain in 
battle with the Dutch. The charge incurred was 550?., 
which was very much less than the ' publick ' was to be 
called on to pay for furnishing the apartments of Madam 
Carwell, and other persons who were disqualified not by 
sex only, for fighting Van Tromp or sinking Spanish 
fleets at Santa Cruz. When the bodies of the Common- 
wealth and Cromwellian leaders were removed from 
Henry the Seventh's Chapel, Blake's corpse suffered the 
sa.me fate as those of his old comrades in arms. This, 
which is assuredly one of the least dignified incidents 
of the Restoration, has been the subject of a great deal 
of sufficiently frothy rhetoric. In itself, the measure was 
natural, and even inevitable. The restored monarchy 



Santa Cruz de Tenerife 177 

could scarcely be expected to allow the remains of men 
wlio liad fouglit to beat down the crown, and to keep 
it down, to repose among the monuments of the Kings. 
If it did a not unnatural thing in an unnecessarily 
brutal way, that, too, was in keeping with the manners 
of the time, and a part of the callous vulgarity which 
was the note of the Restoration in manners, govern- 
ment, and literature. There seems to be some doubt 
whether the body of Blake was thrown into a common 
grave with those of Deane, Ireton, and Cromwell, or 
given over to his family to be decently reinterred else- 
where. The subject is to my mind a most unsavoury 
one, and not worth investigating even if the evidence 
were to be got. It belongs for the rest to the lives of 
the men who fled before him when living, and not to 
the life of the great Admiral and General at sea who 
wore his body out, fighting against the enemies of the 
human race and of England. 

Blake died in possession of much such a modest 
fortune as he had inherited from his father. His will, 
drawn up on board the ' Naseby ' in St. Helen's Road 
in 1656, contains a list of small legacies amounting in 
all to less than 3,000L of the money of that time. 
One sum of 60^. goes to ' the negro called Domingo, my 
servant, and is to be disposed of by my aforesaid nephew 
Captain Robert Blake, and Captain Thomas Adams, for 
his better education in the knowledge and fear of God.' 
There is also mention of a manor at Crandon-cum- 
Puriton, of houses in Bridgewater, and of ' all the 
rest of my goods and chattels,' which does not probably 
stand for any considerable amount. Two of the legacies, 
of lOOL each, are to the poor of his native town of 

N 



178 Robert Blake 

Bridgewater, and of his old government of Taunton. 
The gold chain given to him, as well as to Monk and 
Penn, at the end of the Dutch war, is left to his nephew, 
Captain Robert Blake. His services to the State were 
not productive of wealth to the Admiral. It does not 
appear that he received any prize-money for the Plate 
ships taken in 1656, though at a later period his rank 
would have entitled him to a handsome sum. He was 
not one of those Parliamentary officers who were en- 
riched by grants of confiscated land. The 500Z. given 
him for the defence of Taunton, and the 1000?. voted 
after his return from the first cruise into the Medi- 
terranean, represent all he gained over and above his 
' pay and provend.'' Like so many fighting men of that 
time, he had to complain with Dalgetty of the extreme 
irregularity of his paymasters. It is even stated by the 
editor of the Calendar of State Papers for 1657-58, that 
he was owed the sum of 3,815?. 16s. for arrears of salary 
at the date of his death. When it is remembered that 
this sum is equivalent to about 15,00OL of our money, 
and represented several years' pay, it seems unlikely 
that the State was so heavily in his debt. The wording 
of the order for the payment of the sum on July 21, 1657, 
is consistent with the supposition that it was meant for 
the general service of his squadron, which was then 
about to come home, and must be paid off. Even, how- 
ever, if he was punctually paid his salary, he gained 
little else in the way of worldly goods during the Civil 
War. Blake was not one of those sequestrators and 
committee men who built themselves up fortunes out of 
the plunder of the Royalists. 



179 



CHAPTEK XII. 

CONCLUSION. 

In reporting the departure of tlie ' George,' ' Newbury ' 
and ' Colchester ' from Plymouth with the Admiral's 
body, Captain Henry Hatsell observes, ' I suppose he 
will have a very honourable interment, befitting a person 
of his worth, who indeed, setting some human frailties 
aside (from which the best of men are not free) may be 
ranked with most that have gone before him in our age.' 
If the captain had only recorded some of these same 
human frailties, we might have forgiven him for his 
platitude. If he had, it would have been easier to know 
what sort of man Robert Blake was. A series of actions 
do not make a biography, however long and brilliant it 
may be. Mr. Oarlyle gave up his intention of writing 
a life of Montrose, because it was impossible to discover 
what the Royalist hero ' was really like.' The instinct 
•of the great interpreter of character undoubtedly led 
him right, and yet, in mere bulk, the materials for the 
life of Montrose are abundant. Bulk is, however, the 
least merit of historical evidence. Ten lines of one of 
Cromwell's letters, or of Nelson's, are worth volumes 
of State papers and official reports, as helps towards 
realising the nature of the man. Contemporaries are 

N 2 



i8o Robert Blake 

good witnesses when they have a share of Claren- 
don's faculty of character-drawing, or Boswell's power 
of making a man draw himself. When they have 
not — and it is unnecessary to point out how often that 
is the case — they are witnesses for very little, barely 
even for themselves. When no Clarendon or Boswell 
has been standing by, a man must paint himself, but 
the actors of conspicuous parts in history who could 
stamp their individuality on their every word and action, 
are nearly as rare as the great creative geniuses of 
literature. 

Blake was a far less prominent figure in the great 
civil war than Montrose, and proportionately less is 
known about him. We have Ca|)tain Hatsell's word 
for it that he was not one of those perfect men whom 
Mr. Carlyle found such a limited, uninteresting sort, 
but we have the general statement, and nothing more. 
In Ludlow's memoirs there is a mention of him which 
promises well, and then the same barrenness of detail. 
' When I came to the House of Commons, I met Col. 
Rob. Blake, attending to be admitted, being chosen 
for Taunton ; where having taken the usual oaths, we 
went into the House together, which I chose to do, 
assuring myself, he having been faithful and active 
in the publick service abroad, that we should be as 
unanimous in the carrying it on within those doors.' 
After this generality there is only one casual mention 
of his name. Faithful and active, stout and valiant, he 
was by the consent of all men, but a bundle of adjec- 
tives do not make an individuality. 

Of the few stories told about him, not one can be 
shown to rest on thoroughly satisfactory evidence. 



Conclusion i8i 

His patronising goodnature to the Royalist trumpeter 
at Taunton is reported in a doggrel broadside. His 
rather contemptuous permission to the French captain 
in the Straits to go back to his ship and fight her if he 
could, and his vehement assertion of the rights of 
Englishmen at Malaga, are supported only by the 
authority of Whitelocke and Burnet. There is nothing 
incredible in any of the three. Even the release of the 
French captain may well be true, since, if the man's 
ship's company were resolved to fight, they could do it 
without him. Neither Blake's orders nor the character 
universally ascribed to him are consistent with the 
supposition that he would have committed the mean 
trick of getting the Frenchman on board on false 
pretences, and then attacking his ship without warning. 
That would have been much too like the heroic feat of 
the late Admiral Courbet at Foochow. A more famous 
and honourable story than any of the three can be 
proved to be absolutely false. It has been said that 
during the attack on Santa Cruz, Captain Benjamin 
Blake, a younger brother of the Admiral's, was guilty 
of gross misconduct. His failure was known to his 
brother and commander. When the action was over, 
Blake insisted on bringing him to a court martial, and 
exerted his authority to overcome the reluctance of his 
captains to try the brother of their Admiral. When the 
court brought in a very light sentence, Blake dismissed 
his offending brother from the squadron. It may be an 
open question whether it is more honourable for a man 
to behave with such stern impartiality as this, or never 
to have had a brother who showed the white feather, 
but Blake was never subjected to the trial. Captain 



1 82 Robert Blake 

Benjamin was not in the fleet which attacked Santa 
Cruz. He did show a very mutinous disposition when 
acting as second in command under Goodson in the 
West Indies, and some vague reminiscence of this is 
probably the origin of the story, but in its popular 
form it is certainly untrue. However suspicious the 
best authenticated of these tales may be, they are, how- 
ever, not quite without value as evidence of the charac- 
ter of Blake. We lend only to the rich, according to the 
well-known French proverb, and such anecdotes would 
hardly have been invented except about a leader who 
was both strictly honourable and magnanimously brave. 
The very paucity of stories about Blake has a 
certain negative value as evidence. It is at least some 
proof of what he was not. It may be safely asserted 
that no man could have played so active a part as he 
did in the West, within earshot of Clarendon, or could 
have sat in Parliament during the stormy period of the 
second civil war, by the side of Sir William Waller and 
Edmund Ludlow, and yet have never said or done any- 
thing which any of the three thought worth recording, 
if he had been either an active politician or a man of 
pronounced religious opinions. Only an exceedingly 
acute attack of what Macaulay called the lues Boswel- 
liana (an inaccurate name for a not uncommon disease) 
could mislead any biographer into making of Blake a 
political leader of any mark. On the contrary, he 
was, throughout his whole Parliamentary career, a 
silent and voting member. It was not until the last 
century had begun, that anything was heard of his 
political opinions. In his own time it was written that 
' as he lived, so he continued to the death, faithful.' 



Conclusion 183 

He was true to liis party, and if Ms life lias any political 
significance at all, it is because he was a very good 
specimen of tliose Englishmen who took up arms 
against the King, from a belief that he was not main- 
taining but stretching the royal power, who stood by 
the Independents from a fear that the Presbyterians 
would make a ruinous compromise, and who obeyed 
Cromwell on the ground that he was a truer represen- 
tative of their cause than the little knot of pedantic 
Republicans who controlled the Rump. The mere fact 
that he was not one of the King's judges, and yet took 
service in the fleet under a commission from the 
Keepers of the Liberties of England, proves conclusively 
that he was not then considered as a man of much 
mark, and that he was known not to be opposed to the 
measure. The application of the same negative test to 
his religious opinions shows that he was one of the 
party with whom puritanism was a matter of morals and 
conduct, rather than of dogma. We know the religious 
opinions of Massey and Skippon, and of many scores of 
obscure men who rose to the surface for a moment 
during that time of conflict. Of Blake it is only 
known that he cannot have belonged to any of the 
noisier sects of the time, and that he was so far an 
Independent as to sit on Cromwell's committee for 
settling the religious organisation of the country. His 
piety will be doubted only by those who hold the old 
doctrine that all the Puritans were hypocrites, who cut 
their hair short and snuffled through their noses. Now 
and again it is advanced even yet by writers officially 
described as dramatists. Sir Walter Scott, with whom 
they are said to be under the impression that they 



184 Robert Blake 

agree, thought otherwise. In ' Woodstock,' one of the 
best of the second rank of his stories, he has not judged 
the King's enemies with undue favour, but he was 
incapable of the stupidity of thinking that the men 
who 

Could by industrious valour climb 
To ruin the great work of time, 

And cast the kingdoms old 
Into another mould, 

were mere liars and mountebanks. ' It ' (the Puritan) 
' was, however, a cast of mind that formed men for great 
and manly actions, as it adopted principles, and that of 
an unselfish character, for the ruling motive, instead of 
the gratification of passion.' Whatever the religious 
opinions of Blake may have been, they certainly did not 
unfit him for great and manly actions. 

Tradition of a more or less dubious character has 
preserved a few stories of the Admiral's personal appear- 
ance and habits. It is known on the good authority of 
Wood, that he was short and thickset, — the build of a 
born sailor — and much inferior witnesses have added 
that he was of a fair complexion and broadfaced. The 
account of his habits given in the ' History and Life,' is 
to be accepted with great caution, but this much is to 
be said for it, that it is not inconsistent with what is 
known on undoubted authority. The writer, who pro- 
fesses to repeat the report of one who had known the 
Admiral, describes him as possessing a character of the 
kind called solid. He was a man of few words and 
solitary habits. ' His look inclined rather to the stern 
than to the soft, and he never fell into any kind of 
drollery, yet would often be pleasant, and generally 



Conclusion 185 

affected to express his pleasantry in some Latin verse 
or saying, of which he had always the most proper ad 
■unguem^ being an excellent scholar as well as soldier/ 
This, if it is not an amplification, is a friendly version of 
the ' moroseness and fondness for the occasional society 
of good fellows ' attributed to him by Clarendon. It 
would have been strange if a man who had been nine 
years at Oxford could not quote Latin in an age when it 
was in very familiar use. The rather feeble garrulity of 
the account is in favour of the honesty of the author, 
in saying that he was informed by one Thomas Bear, 
who had been the Admiral's servant. There is no such 
person mentioned in the will, but an old servant would 
have tattled along very much in this fashion : — ' General 
Blake pray'd himself aboard his ship, with such of his 
men as could be admitted to that duty with him, and 
the last thing he did after he had given his commands 
and word to his men in order to retire to his bed, was to 
pray with the aforementioned Mr. Bear. When that was 
over he was wont to say, " Thomas, bring me the pretty 
cup of sack," which he did, with a crust of bread ; he 
would then sit down, and give Thomas liberty to do the 
same, and inquire what news he had of his Bridgewater 
men that day, and talk of the people and affairs of the 
place.' The valet is notoriously a poor judge of a hero, 
but the real or imaginary Mr. Thomas Bear had nothing 
belittling to tell of Blake. Beyond the pretty cup of 
sack, always taken ' with exemplary moderation,' and 
the interest taken in his townsmen, there is little in Mr. 
Bear's reminiscences which is not of the usual general 
character. That Blake was not given to the naval 
cursing and swearing common in the days of Commo- 



1 86 Robert Blake 

dore Trunnion and later, may easily be believed about 
tbe Puritan. That lie carried on his command without 
the bullying of Smollett's time and later, is not less 
credible of the admiral of a revolutionary government 
which had to employ good treatment and improved pay 
to counteract old habits of loyalty to an exiled royal 
race. 

On the whole, the Blake partially sketched by the 
dubious Mr. Thomas Bear has a striking air of veri- 
similitude. It is the portrait, as far as it goes, of a 
sober, solid, and laborious Englishman of the provincial 
middle class, patriotic and pious, with a wholesome 
indifference to theories, and with a practical faculty for 
managing business. 

It was only as a fighting man that Blake can be said 
to have approached greatness in any rational sense of 
the word. As an admiral he gained a position which 
continued to be unrivalled until more than a century 
after his death. Whether such a life is as interesting as 
it is theoretically supposed to be, is perhaps doubtful. 
Certainly there is no class of men who play a smaller 
part in biography than admirals. Their greatness is 
taken for granted. Nelson is indeed an exception, but 
then he was an exception in so many respects, not the 
least important of them being that he found SoutHey 
for a biographer. The interest of his life, too, is largely 
independent of his great feats in battle. Das ewig 
Weibliche plays a very large part in his doings, and 
his famous saying, ' if there were more Emmas there 
would be more Nelsons ' is true in a sense he never 
meant the words to bear. Fortunately or not, no other 



Conclusion 187 

admiral has possessed in an equally eminent degree that 
power of going to the devil for a woman which Miss 
Crawley admired so much in ' the shaker of the Baltic 
and the Nile.' With the exception of this one, who will 
always be attractive to all who care for the study of 
character, by virtue of his colossal vanity, his strange 
mixture of heroism and childishness, his erratic gene- 
rosity, and his furious passions, the admirals have, 
like other seamen, formed a nation by themselves. 
Generals may be, and often have been, eminent as 
statesmen and conspicuous in society. An admiral 
can hardly be. He must live at a distance from capital, 
and court, and politics. At best he sees them only at 
intervals, and his work is done under conditions which 
few understand. Neither are these conditions such as 
lead to much variety of character. The seaman was 
drawn once and for all by Clarendon. Even the genius 
of Southey, and the apparent interest of his subject, has 
not saved his lives of Frobisher, Cavendish, Drake, and 
Hawkins, admirably written as they are, and full of 
stirring tales of the sea, from falling into comparative 
obscurity. To read these things with pleasure one 
must possess a little of the happy faculty of Tartarin. 
The hero of Tarascon could, as everybody knows, so lose 
himself in reading of hunting and travel, that he forgot 
he was sitting in his summer house, and would rush to 
his stand of tomahawks and slay imaginary redskins. 
Tartarin was not so absurd as his malicious biographer 
has been pleased to describe him. Without a consider- 
able share of his boyish love of reading about good 
fights, nobody can enjoy the naval side of the history of 



1 88 Robert Blake 

England, whicli after all is not without its importance as 
a part of our national activity. 

When Campbell linked the name of Blake with 
Nelson's, he did more than consult the exigencies of his 
metre. The two are very fit to be named together, for 
as the one did the very utmost that could be done with 
the old sailing fleet, and can never have a rival, the 
other was the first of the modern admirals. The Eliza- 
bethan seamen had been brilliant privateers, discoverers, 
and adventurers, but they were rather armed traders 
who were driven to fight, than naval officers. Blake 
was the servant of the State as much as Anson or 
Rodney. He was the first man to command the 
English fleet when it became a great and ubiquitous 
force. The distinction he gained in his office, and the 
vital service he rendered his country, were not mainly 
due to any intellectual qualities. As a pure strategist 
he cannot be said to have shown any great originality. 
Tromp was certainly, and his own subordinate Lawson 
was probably, his superior in this respect. Intrepidity 
of character is much more his note than skill. Claren- 
don's masterly portrait has been occasionally cavilled at, 
but, as is usually the case with this master-draftsman's 
handiwork, it is essentially true. ' He was the first man 
that declined the old track, and made it manifest that 
the science might be attained in less time than it was 
imagined ; and despised those rules which had been long 
in practice, to keep his ship and his men out of danger, 
which had been held in former times a point of great 
ability and circumspection, as if the principal art requi- 
site in the captain of a ship had been to be sure to come 



Conclusion 189 

home safe again. He was tlie first man who brought 
the ships to contemn castles on shore, which had 
been thought ever very formidable, and were discovered 
by him to make a noise only, and to fright those who 
could rarely be hurt by them. He was the first that 
infused that proportion of courage into the seamen, by 
making them see by experience what mighty things 
they could do if they were resolved, and taught them 
to fight in fire as well as upon water, and though he hath 
been very well imitated and followed, he was the first 
that gave the examjDle of that kind of naval courage 
and bold and resolute achievements.' 

It is easy enough to pick holes in this sketch, but 
whoever thinks he can better Clarendon will generally 
find that he is repeating the same judgment in tamer 
words. When Blake took the advice of his council of 
ofiicers, and fought off* Dungeness ; when he acce23ted 
battle with Tromp in the Channel, though he had only 
twelve ships by him, and so checked the progress of the 
Dutch fleet until his own supports could come up ; when 
he attacked Porto Farina without orders, and when he 
sailed into Santa Cruz, what he showed was above all 
things intrepidity. There was calculation and good 
management, but they were less conspicuous than un- 
daunted courage. If he added nothing to the naval 
science of his age, he showed the utmost that could be 
done, with the navy as it was, by men who were 
prepared to dare all. 

To speak of him as a great man, as one who stood 
over against Oliver Cromwell, would be mere bio- 
grapher's midsummer madness. At the best he came 



190 Robert Blake 

as near as any man of liis time to being as tall as the 
liilt of the Protector's sword. But lie left a character 
without a stain ; he rendered great services to England ; 
he set an example which hath been very well imitated 
and followed, and that is more than enough to entitle 
him to the name of Worthy. 



INDEX, 



Akson, captain of ' Bonaven- 

ture,' 100, 101 
Algiers, pirate power of, 121 
Allen, captain at sea for King, 

49 
Asciie, Admiral, at Scilly Isles, 

67 ; opposed to Tromp, 85, 

86 



Badajos, Marquis of, 160 et 
seq. See Plate ships 

Batten, captain of 'Garland,' 
100, 101 

Bawdon, Parliamentary officer, 
story of, 31 , 

Berkeley, Sir John, Eoj^alist 
officer, 21 ; besieges Taunton, 
27 

Blake, Benjamin, apocryphal 
story of, 181 

Blake, Captain Samuel, brother 
of Eobert, killed, ' had no 
business there,' 15 

Blake, family of, 2, 3 

Blake, Humphrey, father of 
Admiral, 2 ; his fortune, ib. 

Blake, Rolbert, mentioned by 
Nelson, 1 ; by birth a gentle- 
man, 2 ; birth, 3 ; Anthony 
Wood's account of, ib. ; Clar- 
endon's account of, 4 ; at 



Wadham College, 5, 6 ; in- 
herits estate, 6 ; Puritan 
opinions, 7 : in Short Parlia- 
ment as member for Bridge- 
water, iJ). ; in Civil War, 11 ; 
in Popham's regiment, 12 ; 
in garrison of Bristol, 14 ; 
story of his brother Samuel, 
15 ; commands Prior's Hill 
Fort, 16; defends same, 17, 
18 ; refuses to surrender, 20; 
at Lyme, 20-23; defends 
Taunton, 25-33 ; takes Dun- 
ster Castle, 34 ; rewarded by 
Parliament, ih. ; member for 
Taunton, ih. ; admiral and 
general at sea, 35 ; preparing 
squadron, 51 ; blockades Kin- 
sale, 52 ; offered command 
in Ireland by Cromwell, 53 ; 
is to sail for Portugal, ih.', 
sails, 54 ; his orders, ih. ; off 
Lisbon, 56 ; takes English 
ships in Portuguese pay, 59 ; 
captures Brazil fleet, 60 ; and 
Rupert's ships, 61 ; action 
with French ships, 63 ; 
home, 64 ; awarded 1,000Z. 
and thanked by Parliament, 
65 ; in command of Irish 
seas, 65 ; at Scilly Isles, QQ \ 
appointed to land command 



192 



Robert Blake 



BLAKE 

in West, 68 ; in Downs, 69 ; 
helps to take Jersey, 70, 71 ; 
at Whitehall, 72; his sea- 
manship, 73 ; fight with 
Tromp off Dover, 80; sails 
against Dutch herring fleet, 
85^,; scatters Vendome's 
ships, 88 ; wins battle off 
Kentish Knock, 95 <?^ seq. ; 
battle off Dungeness, 99 et 
seq. ; at battle of Portland, 
103 ; wounded, 104 ; ill on 
shore, 106 ; his political con- 
duct, 109 et seq. ; at sea 
again, 112; again ill, 113; 
in Channel, 115 ; sails for 
Mediterranean, 117; on coast 
of Italy, 118 ; attacks Tunis, 
125 ; at Malaga, 131 ; block- 
ading Cadiz, 137 ; back in 
England, 113 ; sails south 
with Montague, 144 ; second 
blockade of Cadiz, 151 ; his 
attack on Santa Cruz, 165- 
172 ; praised for, 172, 173 ; 
returns to Cadiz, ]74; ill- 
ness and return home, 175 ; 
death, ih. ; funeral, 176 ; his 
body disinterred after Ee- 
storation, 177 ; his will, 177- 
178 ; his character and ser- 
vice to navy, 179-190 

Blockades, tedium of, 141 

Bristol, siege of, 16-20 



HOENER 

orders from, 139 ; discourses 
probabilities as to Cadiz and 
Gibraltar, 157 



Deane, Colonel, admiral and 
general at sea, 35, 50-52, 
102, 112, 113 

De Euyter, Dutch admiral, 
succeeds Tromp in command, 
88 

De Witt, Dutch admiral, suc- 
ceeds Tromp in command, 
88, 95 

Diagues, Don Diego, governor 
of Santa Cruz, 167 

Dungeness, battle off, 99 et 



Fairfax, Sir Thomas, raises 
siege of Taunton, 33 



Gable, battle of, 112 
Galleys as fighting ships, 155 
Gibraltar, proposal to seize, 157 
Goring, Eoyalist general, sur- 
renders Portsmouth, 13 
Greenvil, Sir Bevil, leader of 
the Eoyalists in West, 1 3 ; 
killed at Lansdown, 20 
Greenvil, Sir John, governor of 

Scilly Isles for King, Q<c) 
Greenvil, Sir Eichard, besieges 
Taunton, 27 



Cadiz, blockade of, 137 ; second 
blockade of, 153 ; proposal 
to seize, 157 

Carteret, Sir George, governor 
of Jersey for King, 69 ; sur- 
renders, 71 

Ceely, Colonel, governor of 
Lyme, 21 

Oromwell,01iver,Blake younger 
than, 3 ; expels Eump, 108 



Hatsell, Captain, quoted, 179 

Hertford, Marquis of, at Wells, 
12 ; at Sherborne and Min- 
head, 13 21 

Holland, causes of war with, 
75 ; naval power of, 82-13 

Hopton, Sir Ealph, Eoyalist 
ofiicer, 13, 20 

Horner, Sir John Parliamen- 
tary colonel, 12 



Index 



193 



JOHN 



John op Beaganza, king of 
Portugal, 56 et seq. 



Kentish Knock, sea - fight 

near, 93 et seq. 
Knoll Hill, near Bridgwater, 

home of Blake, 3 



Lawson, John, admiral, 105, 

113 
Lyme, siege of, 21-23 



Malaga, Blake at, 131-132 

Maurice, Prince, commands for 
King in West, 21 

Meadows, Mr. See Portugal, 
negotiations 

Monk, George, joined in com- 
mand with Blake, 102, 104, 
112, 113 

Montague, after Earl of Sand- 
wich, joined in command 
with Blake, 144, 160, 162, 
163 



Navy, state of, in Blake's time, 
33-47 ; strength as compared 
to Dutch, 84 

Nelson, Lord, mentions Blake 
in a letter to Earl St. Vin- 
cent, 1 



Penn, Sir William, admiral, 
' diaries of, 52, 95, 105, 117 
Philip IV., King of Spain, 

138 
Plate ships, 133 e^ seq. ; cap- 
ture of, 161. See Stayner 
Popham, Colonel, admiral and 

general at sea, 35-50 
Popham, Colonel Alexander, 
Parliamentary officer, 12 



SHIPS 

Portland, battle of, 103 et seq. 
Porto Farina (Tunis), action at, 

125 et seq. 
Portugal, negotiations with, 

147 et seq. 
Pressgang, 102, 145, 146 
Protector. See Cromwell 



KUPERT, Prince, commands 
squadron for King, 48-50 ; 
at Kinsale, 50, 52 ; at Lis- 
bon, 53, 55, 57-60 ; in Medi- 
terranean, 61 ; end of his 
cruise, 62 

Euthven, Parliamentary gene- 
ral, afterwards RoyaUst, 13 



Sainte Beuve, his essay on 
D'Aubigne, 9 

Salute, question of, 77 

Santa Cruz, attack on, 165 et 
seq. ; Nelson's attack on, 173 

Ships : — Amity, 125 ; Andrew, 
94, 95, 125 ; Antelope, 148 ; 
Bonaventure, 100, 101 ; 
Brederode, 79, 101 ; Bridge- 
water, 125, 160 ; Colchester, 
179 ; Concord, 65 ; Constant 
Warwick, 65, &Q ; Convert, 
65 ; Convertine, 48, 65 ; Fel- 
lowship, 65 ; Foresight, 125 ; 
Fox, 65-66; Garland, 100, 
101 ; George, flagship, 125, 
175 ; Guinea, 49, 53 ; Hector, 
65-66; Hind, 65; Hoy, 65; 
James, flagship, 78, 79, 93 ; 
Little Parliament, 65 ; Maria, 
125 ; Mayflower, 65, QQ ; Mer- 
lin, 125 ; Mermaid, 125 ; 
Newbury, 179 ; Newcastle, 
125 ; Nonsuch, 53 ; Pearl, 
125 ; Phoenix, 65, 151 ; Ply- 
mouth, 125, 161 ; Portsmouth 
65 ; Princess, 125 ; Provi- 
dence, 65 ; Resolution, 93 ; 



194 



Robert Blake 



SHIPS 

Eoebuck, 49 ; Taunton, 125 ; 
Tenth Whelp, 65, 'o^ ; The- 
seus, ^^ ; Triumph, flagship, 
104 ; Truelove, 65 ; Sapphire, 
152, 156, 160 ; Sovereign, 94, 
100; Speaker, 152, 156, 160 ; 
Success, 125 ; Swallow, 48 ; 
Swiftsure, 65, ^^ ; Unicorn, 
125; Victory, flagship, 69, 
100 ; Worcester, 125 

Slanning, Sir Nicholas, Eoyal- 
ist, 13 ; killed at Bristol, 20 

Spain, attack on, 116 

Stamford, Earl of. Parliamen- 
tary general, 13 

Stawell, Sir John, Eoyalist offi- 
cer, 14 

Stayner, Sir Eichard, takes 
Plate ships, 160-162,168, 169 



Tactics, naval, in seventeenth 
century, 91, 92 

Taunton, capture of, 24 ; siege 
of, 25-33 

Trevanion, Sir John, Eoyalist, 
13 ; killed at Bristol, 20 

Tromp, Dutch admiral, at Scilly 
Isles, 67 ; in Straits, 78 ; at- 
tacks Blake off Dover, 79 ; 
threatens Ascue, 86 ; fleet 
scattered by storm, 87 ; re- 



WYNDHAM 

signs command, %b. ; restored 
to command, 98 
Tunis, pirate power of, 119 et 



Vandeuske, Colonel, Parlia- 
mentary officer, relieves 
Taunton, 27 

Venables, Colonel, 117 



Waller, Sir E., quoted, 163 
Warwick, Earl of. Parliamen- 
tary admiral, 28 
Weir, Colonel, ' Diurnal of,' 22 ; 

wounded, 23 
Welden,Colonel, Parliamentary 
officer, relieves Taunton, 30- 
31 
West, campaigns in, 12-13 
Whistler, Dr. Daniel, 107 
Worcester, battle of, 69 
Worcester, Earl of, richest noble 
in England temp. Charles I., 3 
Wounded, bad state of, at 

Portsmouth, 107 
Wyndham, a Eoyalist member 
for Bridgewater in Long 
Parliament, 8 ; besieges 
Taunton, 26 ; driven away, 
27 



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VOLTAIRE. By John Morlet. 12mo. Cloth, $2.00. 

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New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street. 



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